Who Sees What
Awazon market onion addresses
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awazonozc4jwyrveu4473igv5ldt2hnccl2s7lerm2z27cvrc22e4uyd.onion
awazonth6ocz5cyos63czmhtsglqr7ydkdcc4lopux7nxbauoo2qmvyd.onion

Printed exactly as supplied, in the order supplied, with no labels and no ranking between them. This site runs no checks against any of them. It publishes no uptime figure, no status light and no date of last checking, because it never looks. An address that opens is not by itself evidence of anything.

Your own device: the observer with the best seat

Everything the network could not read, your own machine had to render in plain sight. It is the closest observer in this catalogue, and the only one whose record you can pick up and carry around.

The seat nearest the screen

Encryption is a property of data in motion. It protects a message from everything between two endpoints, and it stops protecting the moment the message arrives, because arriving means being turned back into something a person can read. Your screen is where that happens. A page of listings, a delivery form with your street on it, a message thread, a payment string: all of it exists in readable form on the machine in front of you, because there is no other way to show it to you.

That is not a flaw and it is not a leak. It is the definition of an endpoint. Every other observer in this catalogue works with a partial view. Your network sees encrypted volume and timing. The Tor network is built so that no single relay holds both halves of the picture. The market server sees only what you sent it. Your device sees the whole thing, in the clear, and it sees it first.

What makes this observer different is not the quality of its view. It is the duration. A relay forgets a circuit in minutes. A device has storage, and storage is the business of not forgetting.

Saved on purpose, kept by accident

There are two completely different reasons a file exists on your machine, and readers routinely mix them up.

The first is a decision. You pressed save, or download, or screenshot, or copy. You know the file exists, you probably know roughly where it went, and you could describe it to someone. Most of what people worry about is in this category, and this category is the easy one, because a thing you chose to create is a thing you can choose not to create.

The second is machinery. An operating system writes caches so the next thing is faster, crash reports so a developer can fix a bug, memory to disk when memory runs short, and indexes so search works. None of that was aimed at you and none of it was hidden either. It is the by-product of a general purpose computer doing general purpose things, and it happens whether or not the program on top is trying to be careful.

Tor Browser is genuinely careful. It is built to keep very little between sessions, and that is a real, meaningful difference from an ordinary browser rather than a marketing line. But it is one program running on a machine that has other ideas, and it never agreed to speak for the layer underneath it. What lands on the disk takes that apart properly.

SCOPENothing in this section is a cleanup guide, and none of it is written to help anyone defeat an examination. It describes what exists on an ordinary machine and why, which is a thing worth knowing before you decide what to put there.

A machine has a custody history

Here is the part that separates this observer from all the others. A relay is a process on a server somewhere. An ISP record is a row in a database. Neither of those is an object you can hold. A laptop is.

Objects have histories. They get lent to a flatmate for an evening. They get taken to a repair shop, where somebody with full access spends an hour inside them. They get sold on, given to a relative, left on a desk at work, packed in hand luggage, borrowed by a partner who needed to print something. Each of those is a moment where the record inside the object was, briefly, in hands other than yours. That is a category of exposure that no amount of transport encryption addresses, because the transport was never the problem.

It also means the record is durable in a way that suits an unhurried reader. What survives is whatever survived, and survival is a question of storage design rather than of intent.

The overlap with the people around you is deliberate: a device that other people touch is an observer with a queue behind it. Lending the machine covers the human half of that.

What this section covers

Six cards, each about one class of thing the machine holds. The disk itself, and the gap between what a careful browser does and what the system beneath it does anyway. The clipboard, a shared buffer almost nobody thinks of as storage. Images, both screenshots and photographs of a screen, which turn something transient into something permanent. Backups and sync, the quiet one and probably the most underrated page here. Files you deliberately downloaded. And everything else running on the machine, which is the card that explains why a work laptop is not the same kind of object as a personal one.

Read them in any order. Each says what the observer learns and, at the same length, what it does not.

Your deviceWhat lands on the diskAnyone with the machine later · The operating system itself · A repair or resale buyerThe browser is built to forget. The operating system beneath it was built to remember, and it was not asked.4 things reduce thisYour deviceThe clipboardEvery program running · Clipboard history features · A synced second deviceOne buffer, every program on the machine, and sometimes every device you own. Copy is a write operation.4 things reduce thisYour deviceScreenshots and photosThe photo library · Anyone scrolling the gallery · Whoever the image is sent toA screenshot is a decision to make something permanent. A phone photo of a screen adds a place and a time for free.5 things reduce thisYour deviceBackups and syncThe backup provider · The account holder · Anyone who signs into the accountSomewhere there is a second copy, held by a company, under an account with your name on it.5 things reduce thisYour deviceFiles you downloadedThe file system · Anyone reading the file later · The document format itselfA download is a deliberate act that produces an object, and objects have dates, attributes and sometimes an author.4 things reduce thisYour deviceThe rest of the softwareSecurity software · The operating system vendor · An employer on a work machineThe browser is one process among dozens. The others have their own jobs, their own logs and sometimes their own network connections.4 things reduce this

The whole catalogueAll seven observers

Questions that come up

Does Tor Browser stop things being written to the disk?

It does a lot within its own boundary. It is designed not to carry history, cache or cookies from one session into the next, and that is a real difference from a normal browser. It has no authority over what the operating system writes on its own account, because the operating system is not a party to that decision.

Is this section about hiding things?

No. It describes what an ordinary machine retains and why it retains it. There are no instructions here for wiping, hiding or destroying anything, and there is nothing aimed at obstructing an examination of a device.