Onionspray and website anonymity

The presumed use-case of Onionspray is that you have an already-public website you wish to give it a corresponding Onion address. This, by default will already offers a protection the user location to be disclosed by default.

But what to say about the website location and identity?

A lot of people mistakenly believe that Tor Onion Networking is mainly about anonymity -- which is incorrect, since it also includes:

• Extra privacy.
• Identity/surety of to whom you are connected.
• Freedom from oversight/network surveillance.
• Anti-blocking, and...
• Enhanced integrity/tamper proofing.

... none of which are the same as "anonymity", but all of which are valuable qualities to add to communications.

Further: setting up an Onion address can provide less contention, more speed & more bandwidth to people accessing your site than they would get by using Tor "Exit Nodes".

If you set up Onionspray in its intended mode then your resulting site is almost certainly not going to be anonymous; for one thing your brand name (etc) will likely be plastered all over it.

Users location will still get a protection by default (as long as they don't identify themselves by filling a form etc), but Onionspray is not intended to offer the same protection the websites, as it assumes the website is already public.

If you want to set up a server which includes anonymity as well as all of the aforementioned qualities, you want want to be reading some other references:

• Building a Basic "Production" Onion Server on Ubuntu.
• What other attacks are there against Onion Services?.

You may also be interested in setting up the Vanguards Addon.