After a week that saw the exposure of two major government snooping programs, there could be only one choice for “App of the Week”: the Onion Browser for iOS, “a Tor-capable Web browser that lets you access the Internet privately and anonymously.”

The Tor Project aims to provide Internet users with a secure, anonymous browsing alternative that will hide your online activities from government snoops or other Big Data crunchers. While the Onion Browser is not officially affiliated with the Tor Project, it does “tunnel” through the same network of anonymizing relays that provide desktop Tor browsers with a cloak of secrecy.

Yes, I know, my most recent post for Salon declared that online privacy tools are a joke, but it still seemed to me that taking a smartphone anonymizing browser out for a spin was the appropriate thing to do this week.

Installing it is as easy as any other iOS app, although the creator of the Onion Browser, Mike Tigas, is charging 99 cents per download to recoup the costs of subscribing to the iOS Developer Program.

But as soon as you fire up the app, you get an explicit warning not to expect the same comforts as any other smartphone browser.

Please note that web browsing through the anonymization network will be significantly slower than through a non-tunneled browser connection.

I can attest, through personal experience, that this is true.

After visiting Salon and the New York Times to see if there were any recent updates on government snooping I might have missed, I checked out YouTube. As I noted in my online privacy tools piece on Friday, the Tor desktop browser disables plugins such as Flash on security grounds. You have to manually configure Tor to work with Flash if you want to watch YouTube videos. Interestingly, when using the Onion Browser, there’s no problem watching videos.