It hasn’t been the best summer of PR for the Tor anonymizing browser, given that one of its prominent developers — Jacob Appelbaum — stepped down amid allegations of “sexual mistreatment” in June.

So it’s perhaps not too surprising that the pro-privacy organization has decided now is the time to publish a social contract, promoting what it dubs its commitment to ‘advancing human rights’.

“We believe that privacy, the free exchange of ideas, and access to information are essential to free societies. Through our community standards and the code we write, we provide tools that help all people protect and advance these rights,” Tor writes in the contract, which also includes pledges to be transparent and open; to build tools that are free to use; to widen access via education and advocacy work; and to be honest about the limitations of its technology.

The contract can be read in full below.

Tor (aka The Onion Router) is a network technology designed to increase the privacy of web users by encrypting and randomly routing Internet connections via a worldwide network of volunteer relays — thereby making it harder for individual web connections to be traced back to a particular user.

However the flip-side of any anonymizing technology is the risk of criminals or bad actors using it to cover their tracks. So there’s an eternal publicity war to be fought — especially given recent noisy political pushes for there to be ‘no safe spaces for terrorists online’.

It’s been clear for some time that encryption technologies are back in the mainstream firing line, as evinced by high profile battles such as Apple’s fight with the FBI earlier this year over access to a locked iPhone. Or the UK government’s weasel-worded reworking of the legal framework for state investigatory powers in a way that implicitly undermines encryption.

Loudly promoting a human rights and free speech angle appears to be Tor’s counter strategy to all that.

The organization has also recently been seeking to diversify its funding away from dependence on its primary backer, the U.S. government — launching a crowdfunding campaign last November to solicit donations from appreciative web users. A first push that netted it more than $200,000. Although the bulk of its financing still comes from the same entity that has used technology for systematic mass surveillance of web users — so there’s an inevitable tension between Tor’s privacy mission and the (surveillance) state that feeds it.

All of which provides some context for what is perhaps the most specific pledge in the social contract — not to build in any backdoors. “We will never implement front doors or back doors into our projects,” Tor writes.

The rest of the contract, for all its warm-sounding words about transparency and honesty, might be accused of lacking specific substance — if you were reading it with a critical eye and keeping count of qualifiers and caveats.

We’ve asked Tor why it’s publishing a social contract at this point in its evolution and will update this post with any response.

In its PR announcing the social contract it describes it as “a set of behaviors and goals… we want for our community”.

“We want to grow Tor by supporting and advancing these guidelines in the time we are working on Tor, while taking care not to undermine them in the rest of our time. The principles can also be used to help recognize when people’s actions or intents are hurting Tor. Some of these principles are established norms; things we’ve been doing every day for a long time; while others are more aspirational — but all of them are values we want to live in public, and we hope they will make our future choices easier and more open,” it adds.

Here’s Tor’s six-point social contract in full: