Facebook usage over Tor passes one million per month

Facebook’s efforts at catering to the Tor crowd are paying off. According to a new announcement from the social network, more than one million Facebook users interact with the site using Tor, and it hasn’t taken the social network very long to get to that figure.

As of June 2015, around 525,000 people used Tor to access Facebook, according to the company. And this month (April), for the first time ever, that 30-day rolling figure exceeded the magic one million mark. This may have been helped along by the recent rollout of Facebook Tor support on Android phones via the Orbot proxy app.

“People who choose to communicate over Tor do so for a variety of reasons related to privacy, security and safety,” said Alec Muffett, software engineer for security infrastructure at Facebook, in a blog post. “As we’ve written previously, it’s important to us to provide methods for people to use our services securely — particularly if they lack reliable methods to do so.”

While using Facebook over the Tor network does makes the connection from your computer to Facebook’s servers more secure, it doesn’t make users any more anonymous when interacting with commenters who can still see all their regular profile information. The benefit of using Facebook’s .onion address is that you can jump over to read your News Feed in a Tor browser without ever losing the cryptographic protections provided by the Tor cloud.

The Tor service randomly routes internet connections via a worldwide network of volunteer relays, which winds up hiding users’ IP addresses. Traffic to Tor-only sites remains anonymous, and sites, as well as the posts on them, won’t show up in regular internet search results (so long as those sites aren’t mirrored on a regular website, which is what Facebook seems to be doing with its .onion site).

Before the Facebook .onion domain was created, a visit from a Tor user, which could appear to be emanating from an infinite number of locations, would sometimes raise a flag in the social network’s security infrastructure, locking people who liked to use Tor out of their accounts.

Some certainly use Tor and .onion sites for dubious practices, such as online gambling and drugs and arms sales, but there are also some cool sites where those in the cyber security community congregate to discuss topics on politics or just access media without fear of censorship.

Agencies/Canadajournal