FLOSS Weekly episode 879 puts Guardian Project iOS privacy work front and centre, with host Jonathan sitting down with Nathan Freitas to dig into open-source privacy advocacy, the persistent challenge of running a true Tor browser on Apple’s platform, and the thorny question of Android lockdown.
What the Guardian Project Is Working On
The Guardian Project has spent years building open-source security and privacy tools aimed at journalists, activists, and anyone who needs to keep communications out of the wrong hands. In the episode, Freitas walks through where that work currently stands, covering the state of privacy advocacy in the open-source world more broadly and what the project considers the most pressing problems to solve right now.
One of the recurring conversations in privacy circles is whether iOS users can ever get a genuinely functional Tor browser, not a wrapped Safari view, but something that routes traffic properly through the Tor network the way Orbot and related tools do on Android. Freitas addresses this directly, and the answer is, predictably, complicated. Apple’s restrictions on how networking can be handled at the OS level mean that replicating the Android experience on iPhone is not simply a matter of porting code. The episode explores what a realistic path forward might look like, rather than pretending the problem is already solved.
Android Lockdown and the Orbot Numbers
The Android side of the conversation is equally meaty. The so-called Android lockdown issue, the difficulty of ensuring that all traffic from a device, not just traffic from a single app, passes through a secure tunnel, is something the Guardian Project has been wrestling with for some time. Freitas discusses what he sees as the ideal solution, weighing the trade-offs between usability and genuine security for people in high-risk environments.
The scale of the appetite for these tools is not trivial. According to Digital Rights Community, Orbot (the Guardian Project’s Tor-powered proxy app for Android) has surpassed 10 million downloads on Google Play. That figure puts the project’s reach well beyond the niche it might once have occupied, suggesting that demand for private, censorship-resistant networking tools has moved well into the mainstream, or at least into the mainstream of people who know enough to look for them.
That kind of adoption also raises the stakes for getting the Android lockdown question right. With millions of users depending on Orbot as a core part of their security setup, any architectural weakness in how traffic is handled has real-world consequences for real people, not just a theoretical inconvenience for tech enthusiasts.
ProofMode and the Broader Mission
The conversation also touches on ProofMode, another Guardian Project tool designed to add verifiable metadata to photos and videos at the moment of capture, so that evidence gathered in conflict zones or at protests can be authenticated later. It sits alongside the privacy and anonymity work as part of the project’s broader mission: giving people the tools to document the world around them without those tools being turned against them.
Freitas is a familiar name to anyone who has followed open-source privacy tooling over the years, and the episode gives him room to be candid about what is working, what is not, and where the next hard problems lie. The FLOSS Weekly format suits that kind of honest, technically grounded conversation well, there is no product launch to spin, just a working codebase and a set of problems that have not been fully solved yet.
Episode 879 is available as a DRM-free MP3 direct download, with a full transcript available for those who prefer to read. The live recording is also on the FLOSS Weekly YouTube channel.
