Who Sees What
Awazon market onion addresses
awazonloedcyl2otgftfg7qm6e2klbgg2dhouyli3hdno6gdkueh6byd.onion
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.

The clipboard is shared storage that nobody calls storage

You copy an onion address so you do not have to retype it. For a moment or for much longer, that string sits in a buffer that the whole machine can read from.

Who sees it

Every program running · Clipboard history features · A synced second device

A clipboard is a single shared slot. That is its purpose. It exists so that any program can hand something to any other program without the two knowing anything about each other, which is why copy and paste works between a browser and a text editor and a chat window with no arrangement between them.

The consequence follows immediately. If any program can read it, then every program can read it. There is no addressing on a clipboard, no recipient, no permission attached to the content. You do not paste to a specific application so much as put something down in a public place and then ask an application to pick it up.

On most desktop systems this is unrestricted between ordinary applications. On mobile systems it is more constrained, with some platforms notifying you when an app reads the clipboard in the background. Constrained is not sealed.

What a clipboard learns

It learns the literal content, exactly as it was, with no summarising and no lossy step. The things people copy are the things worth copying: a long onion address, a passphrase, a payment string, a delivery address, a message about to be sent. Copy is used precisely for strings too long or too error prone to type, and those are the strings that carry the most meaning.

It also learns the format. A copy from a rendered web page often carries formatting alongside the text, and that formatting can include the underlying link target rather than just the visible label. Paste that into something which accepts rich content and you may have moved more than the words you highlighted.

On systems with a clipboard history feature, it learns a sequence. History turns a slot into a log: the last several things you copied, in order, in a panel that opens with a keyboard shortcut. That panel is a list of the exact strings you thought worth copying today, which is a pointed summary of an afternoon. Some of those histories survive a reboot.

And with cross device sync, it learns on more than one machine. Several platforms carry a clipboard from a phone to a laptop or the reverse, because people like the convenience. That is a copy leaving the device without a file ever being created, which puts it in the territory of backups and sync.

What it does not learn

A clipboard has no idea what the content means. A long random looking string is a long random looking string. Nothing in the buffer marks it as an onion address, a key or a password, and nothing in the mechanism attaches your name, the source page or a timestamp to the content itself. History features add a time, but the buffer alone does not.

It also does not reach the network by itself. A clipboard on a machine with no sync feature enabled is local, and reading it requires something running on that machine, which is the subject of the rest of the software. The scenario where a clipboard is exposed is not remote interception, it is another program on the same computer or another device on the same account.

And it does not survive by default. On most systems a plain clipboard holds one item, it is replaced the moment you copy something else, and it is gone when the machine restarts. The persistence problem is created by history features and by sync, not by the basic mechanism. That makes it quite different from what lands on the disk, where the retention is structural.

The copy buttons on this site

The addresses printed at the top of every page here have copy buttons next to them. Pressing one is a convenience, and it exists because onion addresses are long and typing one by hand is how people end up on the wrong site. It is also, exactly and unavoidably, the action described on this page.

When you press it, this page writes a string into the shared buffer described above. If your system keeps clipboard history, it goes into that history. If your account syncs clipboards, it may appear on your phone. It would be dishonest to describe the clipboard as an observer while pretending the button at the top of the page is something else. Selecting the text and copying it by hand does precisely the same thing.

The site does not publish a status for any address and checks none of them, which is covered under finding the onion address. What it does is put a string on your clipboard when you ask it to.

COMMON MISREADINGPasting reads the buffer, it does not empty it. The content stays until something else replaces it.

What changes the answer

4 things change how much this action gives away. None of them takes it to zero, and none of them is a promise.

  1. Know whether your clipboard has a historyWhether the last twenty copies are retrievable from a panel is a yes or no fact about your system, and most people have never checked. Knowing the answer tells you whether copy is a transient act or a logged one. It does not change what any individual copy contains.
  2. Know whether your clipboard syncsCross device clipboard sync is on by default in some accounts. If it is on, a copy made on one machine is a copy that exists on another, and it is subject to everything on backups and sync. Turning it off leaves any copies already synced where they are.
  3. Copy last, paste immediatelyThe exposure window is between the copy and the next copy. Copying something at the moment you need it, rather than early and then wandering off, keeps that window short. It does nothing about a system that logs every entry regardless.
  4. Type the short thingsSome strings are short enough to type and long enough to matter. A string that never enters the buffer is not in the buffer, which is the only guarantee available here. It also introduces the risk of a typo, which for an onion address is its own problem.

What this card is not

This is a description of a shared buffer, not an accusation that any particular program is reading it. It also makes no claim about what any specific operating system version does.

Questions that come up

Does this site see what I copy?

No. Writing to the clipboard is a one way action performed by your browser on your machine. The page has no way to read back what happens to it afterwards, and there is no record of the press sent anywhere.

Is copying worse than typing an address by hand?

They fail differently. Copying puts an exact string into a shared buffer. Typing keeps it out of that buffer and introduces the chance of a wrong character, which with an onion address means landing somewhere else entirely.