The dark web is World Wide Web content on darknets, which are overlay networks that use the web but require specific software, settings, or access permission. Private computer networks can communicate and conduct companies anonymously through the dark web, without disclosing information such as a location for the user. The dark web forms a small part of the deep web, which is not indexed by web search engines, even if the term deep web sometimes mistakenly refers to the dark web. ¹⁾

Over the past three years, dark web activity has grown 300 percent. ²⁾

More than 30 percent of North Americans regularly access the dark web. ³⁾

More than 2 million active users connect every day to the dark web via the TOR browser. ⁴⁾

The bandwidth capacity of TOR has grown from about 50 Gigabits per second (in 2014) to about 300 Gigabits per second (in 2018). ⁵⁾