Tails will never try to harm you or any of our users, as a core principle of our [social contract](https://community.torproject.org/policies/social_contract/). As part of that commitment, we have written this page to help you make an informed decision about whether you can trust Tails.
Known issues in Tails are described publicly in our [[!tails_gitlab tails/tails/-/issues desc="GitLab issue tracker"]]. We might hide embargoed security vulnerabilities in Tails while we work on a solution, but only as a way of protecting our users.
Debian and its derivatives are [the most popular Linux distributions on web servers](https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/os-linux) across the Internet.
The Debian project is coordinated over the Internet by a team of volunteers whose work is entirely public. All this makes Debian one of the Free Software projects under the most scrutiny by security researchers.
Tor has partnered with leading research institutions and has been subjected to intensive academic research. Tor has received awards from institutions such as the [EFF](https://www.eff.org/awards/pioneer/2012) and the [Free Software Foundation](https://www.fsf.org/news/2010-free-software-awards-announced). Even the NSA qualified Tor as "[the King of high secure, low latency Internet Anonymity](https://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/oct/04/tor-high-secure-internet-anonymity)."
Our downloads are [[reproducible|contribute/build/reproducible]] to make sure that the process of building the downloads from our source code was not altered by our own infrastructure.
We provide [[strong and easy-to-use verification mechanisms|contribute/design/download_verification]] to make sure that our users are downloading a genuine copy of Tails.
