Working With TunnelBear To Circumvent Internet Censorship In Iran

Earlier this year, the team at TunnelBear reached out to us looking to expand their services to Iranian users as part of their new anti-censorship program. Soon after, like many other places around the world, Toronto went into lockdown due to Covid-19. While we didn’t get the chance to meet in person, our team at Paskoocheh started working with the engineers at TunnelBear as they set out to circumvent Internet censorship in Iran. 

We’re happy to announce that starting from September, TunnelBear will increase their free monthly data usage for Iranians from 500MB to 10GB per month. In the current environment where users in Iran face growing online censorship and are unable to pay for VPNs due to sanctions, this is a great step toward providing Iranians with access to information and freedom of expression online. 

Our work at Paskoocheh has always been centered around our user communities. We believe in engaging them at every step of our process so that they, as end-users of circumvention tools, can share their needs and expectations directly with tool developers. Over the past few months, we’ve been working with our users, testing different versions of TunnelBear and discussing and sharing their user experiences. 

Over the past few days we’ve seen TunnelBear downloads continue to increase on Paskoocheh. We’re excited about this new partnership and will continue to support and help Iranian users bypass Internet censorship in Iran and access information online.  

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Paskoocheh (Persian for “alley way”) is an app store for Iranian users. It offers over 100 apps, ranging from circumvention tools to civic tech. Paskoocheh provides localization, outreach, testing, design and development consulting to tool developers looking to reach Iranian users. Offering multiple distribution channels from web to Android, Paskoocheh has facilitated over 4 Million tool downloads. If you like to get in touch with us, email us at hi [at] asl19.org.