Tails will never try harm to youor 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.
[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.
[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)."
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.
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.