= Tor Application Ecosystem Branding =
How can we provide consistent branding for applications in the Tor ecosystem?
Facilitator(s): Nathan
Audience: Steph, Antonela, Isa?, Roger?, Pili?
Duration: 1 hour
Prep
Back in May Nathan and Fabiola from Guardian Project, Carrie and Tiffany from OkThanks and Steph and Pili from Tor Project had a call to discuss Tor brand usage in applications that use Tor in some way.
The purpose of the call was to align all of our efforts towards providing consistent branding family for applications that use tor and are somehow “endorsed" by the Tor Project. For example, there are currently a number of apps in the Apple Store that include Tor in the name and it can be hard for users to make an informed choice as to which apps are trustworthy and somehow “endorsed” by the Tor Project.
For example, we discussed the need for defining a set of requirements and criteria that applications would have to meet in order to be included in this “Tor applications ecosystem” as well as a common language for talking about privacy features within applications. Some ideas for criteria and requirements that came up for me from this discussion are:
- If it’s using tor, this should be compiled using source code
- Should be open source?
- Should be developed by a Tor community member, e.g.
- Someone we know
- actively engaged in the community
Furthermore, when talking about a “Tor applications ecosystem” we should clearly define what it means for an app to be included in this ecosystem and also what it does not necessarily mean, e.g we’re not committing or saying that the application code has been audited by us.
We also spoke about a potential rating system, e.g level 1 - 5 to allow users to make some sort of value judgement on these apps. Another option could be some sort of feature/properties table, similar to the way matrix currently does this: https://matrix.org/docs/projects/clients-matrix, the idea being that we could list these somewhere on a Tor portal, e.g the new developer portal.
Another idea that was shared was the possibility of designing some sort of “Powered by Tor” or “Tor Community" badge (possibly with some sort of rating attached) for these apps that could be added to their website or GitHub repo and link out to a page explaining what this means exactly. Since we had this discussion I also had a thought about what should happen if we need to revoke the "badge”? How do we announce something like this?
Other thoughts around branding Guidelines for “Tor Ecosystem Applications”:
- dos and don’ts, e.g can't put "powered by tor" unless…
- can't use same colour scheme
- differentiate core branding
- Tor Browser icon
- Should we have a common logo family for community apps ?
We briefly discussed Onion Browser and Orbot, and in particular where does Orbot fit in to all this and where should it live going forward e.g Tor Project Android account or Guardian Project Android account.