I have been using it for more than a week and now am worried about the consequences that I am not sure are true or not!
I am worried that by allowing random users to surf using my network to prevent surveillance, someone will use my address to do malicious things, and I will get into legal consequences. Also, what if many services blacklist my IP address so eventually I get a lot of restrictions in my browing experience.
Furthermore, will this extension increase my fingerprint?
Are these thoughts valid, or am I just overthinking? If anyone knows, please comment.
You cannot get into legal trouble for snowflake afaik. Its only a bridge, not an exit node. This means that websites the other person visits will see the exit nodes public ip, not yours.
Running a vpn for snowflake will only slow down the other persons connection without giving you much better security.
If it helps I’ve been running snowflake on my main browser for about a year now with no issues (not saying this is definitive proof for anything though.)
Can the ISP see the websites the other person is visiting?
As others have said, you are as safe as running a non exit node
This lets people use your computer as an entry point into the Tor network and camouflage the traffic as a video call between you and them (if the regular, publicly known, entry nodes are blocked by their ISP or gouvernement). The snowflake extension will then forward people’s traffic through the Tor network, and services they use will only see a tor exit node’s IP, not yours. As long as you trust Tor to be secure and anonymous (I personally have very high trust in its guarantees), you don’t have to worry about legal consequences or being blocked by services.
I used to run a few (public) tor relays (entry or middle nodes, not exit ones), including one from my home network and IP. Never had any issue except for one service which blocked everything that had anything to do with Tor. I reached out for their admin, who claimed Tor users can show up with any node’s IP (which they definetly can’t, only exit nodes will forward traffic to the regular internet)
Everyone is focused on the exit, when clearly there is still a vulnerability to the entrance side. If someone is identified as a bad actor, you do not want your own personal address showing up all over in the logs of who they’ve been conversing with… Regardless of what can be proven as to the nature of conversations, you will now have eyes on you.
So yes, a VPN is useful, just not for all the reasons the comments so far are addressing.
never do it without a VPN, a good one that has a long, proven track record of recording nothing
How/why would a VPN be useful for this ?
It’s the opposite of useful it would break snowflake. You are setting up Snowflake in the first place to give users who have to deal with VPN and IP blocks the opportunity to connect to the onion network through you - if you hide the snowflake relay behind a VPN it is useless to those users.
it would prevent your internet provider from seeing the activity of other people connecting through your PC
The ISP would only see “encrypted video call”-like traffic between you and the people who connect to Tor through your snowflake.
What would a vpn do for you with snowflake? Hide your IP from tor entry nodes and the bridge user. I mean sure more vpn is always great, but running snowflake without a vpn seems less bad than surfing the web without a vpn.
There are no legal risks in forwarding traffic to an entry node and your ISP knowing that you use snowflake also isnt really an issue.
VPNs are commonly used by all kinds of people for mundane things. any kind of darknet kind of stuff is often associated with illegal activity and will be seen as suspicious by your internet provider
again, it can’t just be any VPN, Proton, Mullvad, Nym…and maybe iVPN if you don’t care about the number of locations you can connect through.
you also want to have a few other things open. Anything that makes additional noise in the connection. Even if you use Mullvad’s Daita feature, it’s good to have some extra noise being made while darknet-stuff is being used
oh…I skipped over the primary purpose. If they give you the third degree about using a VPN just say that you use it to keep yourself safe from crazy people online. You can’t play that plausible deniability card with things like snowflake and Tor, but you can with a VPN that’s available to average consumers
I am worried that by allowing random users to surf using my network to prevent surveillance, someone will use my address to do malicious things, and I will get into legal consequences.
Yeah. That’s not a hidden risk, that’s an up-front risk you accept by using the extension. You may want to not let it keep running while the browser is closed, which would reduce how long the connection lets others use your IP.
All extensions make a fingerprint more identifiable. This is usually only used with Tor if a Tor connection is blocked, so if you’re just using this on Chrome or stock FF, yes, it will be very unique.
You’re having valid thoughts - but what are you trying to do? Why not just use a VPN?
