More politically “free” countries have higher proportions of Hidden Services traffic than is present in either “partially free” or “not free” nations. Each point indicates the average daily percentage of anonymous services accessed in a given country. The white regions represent the kernel density distributions for each ordinal category of political freedom (“free,” “partially free,” and “not free.”

“Writing off traffic to these widely-used sites and services as “illicit” is a generalization that demonizes people and organizations who choose technology that allows them to protect their privacy and circumvent censorship. In a world of increasing surveillance capitalism and internet censorship, online privacy is necessary for many of us to exercise our human rights to freely access information, share our ideas, and communicate with one another. Incorrectly identifying all onion service traffic as “illicit” harms the fight to protect encryption and benefits the powers that be that are trying to weaken or entirely outlaw strong privacy technology.Secondly, we look forward to hearing the researchers describe their methodology in more detail, so the scientific community has the possibility to assess whether their approach is accurate and safe. The copy of the paper provided does not outline their methodology, so there is no way for the Tor Project or other researchers to assess the accuracy of their findings.”

Source : Does Tor provide more benefit or harm? New paper says it depends | Ars Technica