Million people log into Facebook through Tor

While some countries filter Tor traffic (like China) or plan to do this in the future ( like Russia ), Facebook, on the contrary, has nothing against users accessing the site via an anonymizer. More precisely, it is not the company itself who expresses such a point of view, but individual activist employees who take the initiative to support Tor. They are confident that this is very important to ensure the safety of citizens who need to hide their location and / or IP address. In addition, Tor allows you to bypass the blocking in countries where censorship is implemented, Facebook or other sites are blocked.

One of Tor's most zealous activists at Facebook is Alec Muffett, a developer from the infrastructure security department in the London division. He and his colleagues over the past two years launched https://www.facebookcorewwwi.onion/ in a hidden network and a mobile version https://m.facebookcorewwwi.onion/ , helped standardize the .onion domain to issue SSL certificates, and also set up a mobile Android applications in Tor via Orbot (Tor for Android).

Yesterday, Alec proudly announced that over a 30-day period on Facebook, a million people had logged in via Tor's anonymizer network. Well, or one person logged into a million accounts.

Thanks to the efforts of developers from the security infrastructure department, the number of users logging into Facebook through secure anonymous channels has recently increased significantly. In June 2015, the monthly audience was 525,000 (including the Tor desktop browser, the Facebook site on the Onion hidden network, or the Orbot mobile connection on Android). Since then, the audience has grown almost linearly and by April 2016 has increased to a million.

“This growth reflects the desire of people to enter the social network through Tor and the importance of this for them,” writes Alec Maffett. “We hope that they will continue to leave feedback for us and help us further improve the service.”