There is a strong suspicion that the TOR network has been turned into a NSA honeypot by virtue of the NSA running more than half of the TOR exit nodes. Do you really want to take that chance?
Not to mention, pretty much the only thing most honest people use TOR for is to defeat geoblocking, and most geoblocked sites of any importance blacklist TOR exit nodes. So it's not even that useful.
I said suspicion, not evidence. The suspicion arises when you try to answer the following 2 basic questions:
Who wants to deanonymize TOR users the most?
Who has the resources to run TOR servers and provide the service for free and why?
Or put another way, apart from a few idealists like the Calyx Institute, nobody in their right mind would foot the bill to run servers mostly used by hackers and pedos. Therefore, the most likely operators are law enforcement and nefarious barely-constitutional three-letter agencies.
Idk if the NSA runs all those exit nodes but this is definitely not the first time I've heard that it isn't secure. Luckily I have nothing to hide so I use Google for everything and send them a daily summary of my offline activities in case they missed anything.
I've been using it since the early days and ran relays and exits. It's good for anonymity against your ISP, advertisers and lesser adversaries than being targeted by TLAs. Can be a bit slow. Make sure to use encryption to protect against bad exit nodes.
Quick question: How does one set up encryption while using the Tor browser for things like searches and regular browsing (research, etc)? Would be useful to know. Appreciate.