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[[!meta title="How can I trust Tails?"]]
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[[!meta stylesheet="donate/testimonials.inline" rel="stylesheet" title=""]]
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Tails will never try harm to you or any of our users, as a core principle of [[our social contract|about/social_contract]]. As part of that commitment, we have written this page to help you make an informed decision about whether you can trust Tails.
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We think that Tails is a trustworthy project because:
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- **Our source code is public**
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Tails is [[Free Software|about/license]] and security researchers worldwide
can examine our [[!tails_gitlab desc="source code"]].
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The most sensitive parts of Tails are explained in our [[design
documents|contribute/design]].
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- **Tails is based on Tor and Debian**
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Most of the software included in Tails has not been written by us, but is
inherited from Tor and Debian:
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[Debian](https://debian.org/) is one of the oldest Linux distributions and the one with the most derivatives, including Ubuntu. Debian and its derivatives are [the most popular Linux distributions on web servers](https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/os-linux) across the Internet. The Debian project is coordinated over the Internet by a team of volunteers whose work is entirely public. All this makes Debian one of the Free Software projects under the most scrutiny by security researchers.
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[Tor](https://torproject.org/) is the best anonymity network available. Tor has partnered with leading research institutions and has been subjected to intensive academic research. Tor has received awards from institutions such as the [EFF](https://www.eff.org/awards/pioneer/2012) and the [Free Software Foundation](https://www.fsf.org/news/2010-free-software-awards-announced). Even the NSA qualified Tor as "[the King of high secure, low latency Internet Anonymity](https://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/oct/04/tor-high-secure-internet-anonymity)."
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- **Our downloads are verifiable**
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Making sure that our users are really downloading an unmodified version of
our work is also critical to trust and security:
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Our downloads are [[reproducible|contribute/build/reproducible]] to make sure that the process of building the downloads from our source code was not altered by our own infrastructure.
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We provide [[strong and easy-to-use verification mechanisms|contribute/design/download_verification]] to make sure that our users are downloading a genuine copy of Tails.
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- **Tails is recommended by renown and diverse people and organizations**
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See also our list of [[sponsors]].
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[[!inline pages="donate/testimonials.inline" raw="yes" sort="age"]]
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