Package: tor Version: 0.4.7.13-1 Severity: grave Dear Maintainer,
please do not autostart the tor system service immediately after installing it using `apt install tor`. Current behavior reveals that the user installed the tor package, because connections to the tor network start immediately after the package is installed. This is problematic for a great many reasons. If apt is configured to use https sources, then it is unlikely a network observer would know that the tor package was being downloaded (unless they can correlate the size of the download with the package size of tor and dependencies, and even that is not a definitive proof). Users don't expect the tor service to start immediately after installing it, nor do they expect it to start automatically on every boot of their system. If users even want to use the tor service, then they generally configure it first before autostarting it (to setup bridges for example). I want to point out that users are not informed about nor asked for any consent to these immediate outside connections to the tor network. No privacy policy or warnings are presented to the user after `apt install tor`, the service simply starts and connects to tor with no indication that this is happening. The service should be shipped in a disabled state, so that it does not start on system boot, nor should the service start immediately after installing tor. If users wish to run the service on the system level automatically on every boot then they can do so by doing `systemctl enable tor.service`. If the tor maintainer really wishes to keep the automatic start of tor service on installation as default behavior, then they should at least create a debconf interface that asks the users if that is what they really wish to happen, so that users can give their informed consent. Additionally, many users simply start the tor executable directly, with configuration files in their home directory, when they need it instead of automatically. When users start the service manually, they are at least presented with this information: [notice] Tor can't help you if you use it wrong! Learn how to be safe at https://support.torproject.org/faq/staying-anonymous Please do not autostart the tor system service immediately after installing it using `apt install tor`. -- System Information: Debian Release: 12.1 APT prefers stable-updates APT policy: (500, 'stable-updates'), (500, 'stable-security'), (500, 'stable') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Kernel: Linux 6.1.0-10-amd64 (SMP w/1 CPU thread; PREEMPT) Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=C.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE not set Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system) LSM: AppArmor: enabled Versions of packages tor depends on: ii adduser 3.134 ii libc6 2.36-9+deb12u1 ii libcap2 1:2.66-4 ii libevent-2.1-7 2.1.12-stable-8 ii liblzma5 5.4.1-0.2 ii libseccomp2 2.5.4-1+b3 ii libssl3 3.0.9-1 ii libsystemd0 252.12-1~deb12u1 ii libzstd1 1.5.4+dfsg2-5 ii runit-helper 2.15.2 ii sysvinit-utils [lsb-base] 3.06-4 ii zlib1g 1:1.2.13.dfsg-1 Versions of packages tor recommends: ii logrotate 3.21.0-1 ii tor-geoipdb 0.4.7.13-1 ii torsocks 2.4.0-1 Versions of packages tor suggests: pn apparmor-utils <none> pn mixmaster <none> pn nyx <none> pn obfs4proxy <none> pn socat <none> pn torbrowser-launcher <none> -- no debconf information
