Tails will never try harm to you or any of our users, as a core principle of our social contract. As part of that commitment, we have written this page to help you make an informed decision about whether you can trust Tails.
We think that Tails is a trustworthy project because:
Our source code is public
Tails is Free Software and security researchers worldwide can examine our source code.
The most sensitive parts of Tails are explained in our design documents.
Tails is based on Tor and Debian
Most of the software included in Tails has not been written by us, but is inherited from Tor and Debian:
Debian is one of the oldest Linux distributions and the one with the most derivatives, including Ubuntu. Debian and its derivatives are the most popular Linux distributions on web servers across the Internet. The Debian project is coordinated over the Internet by a team of volunteers whose work is entirely public. All this makes Debian one of the Free Software projects under the most scrutiny by security researchers.
Tor is the best anonymity network available. Tor has partnered with leading research institutions and has been subjected to intensive academic research. Tor has received awards from institutions such as the EFF and the Free Software Foundation. Even the NSA qualified Tor as "the King of high secure, low latency Internet Anonymity."
Our downloads are verifiable
Making sure that our users are really downloading an unmodified version of our work is also critical to trust and security:
Our downloads are reproducible to make sure that the process of building the downloads from our source code was not altered by our own infrastructure.
We provide strong and easy-to-use verification mechanisms to make sure that our users are downloading a genuine copy of Tails.
Tails is recommended by renown and diverse people and organizations
See also our list of sponsors.
If you look at the way post-2013 whistleblowers have been caught, it is clear the absolute most important thing you can do to maintain your anonymity is reduce the number of places in your operational activity where you can make mistakes. Tor and Tails still do precisely that.
— Edward Snowden,
NSA whistleblower
Tails expands Tor's protections to an entire operating system, and they do so with an unwavering commitment to their Social Contract. Tails is a favorite companion tool of Tor.
— Roger Dingledine,
co-founder of the Tor Project
One of the most robust ways of using the Tor network is through a dedicated operating system that enforces strong privacy- and security-protective defaults. That operating system is Tails.
— Electronic Frontier Foundation
