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Over 1 Million People Use Tor To Check Facebook Anonymously Each Month (techcrunch.com) 63

An anonymous reader writes: More than one million people have used the Tor anonymizing browser to login to Facebook, according to Facebook. Facebook expanded its support for Tor earlier this year as it rolled-out support for the Android Orbot proxy, providing Android Facebook users easier access to use Tor. In October 2014, Facebook created a dedicated onion address for Tor access, once again, making it easier for users to connect via Tor. Tor said some 525,000 people accessed [Facebook] via Tor in June 2015, rising to more than one million this month. "This [Tor] growth is a reflection of the choices that people make to use Facebook over Tor, and the value that it provides them. We hope they will continue to provide feedback and help us keep improving," Facebook added. Users may use Tor to access Facebook because of the location obfuscation feature, as well as to ensure their identity doesn't leak to intermediaries -- such as ISPs or "an agency that surveils the Internet."
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Over 1 Million People Use Tor To Check Facebook Anonymously Each Month

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  • Anonymously?! Haha (Score:4, Insightful)

    by topham ( 32406 ) on Friday April 22, 2016 @07:04PM (#51968683) Homepage

    Facebook is on Tor so the CIA can do network analysis of known origin data. Sure sure, some people jump through proxies first VPn or otherwise, but most don't.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 22, 2016 @07:04PM (#51968685)
    am I missing something here???
    • Heh, really, the irony is thick

    • Yes, when using Tor only you and Facebook know your identity and that you are using Facebook.
      If Facebook were not collaborating with surveillance agencies and even developing a neat interface for them.

    • by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Saturday April 23, 2016 @12:47AM (#51970241)

      Yes you are. Just because I can login to some website and post some comment under some strange pseudonym to discuss religious, cultural, political, or otherwise sensitive topics doesn't mean that I necessarily wish to allow those communications to be read by the government.

      What you're missing, is that some governments are hostile to speech while at the same time in no position to subpoena a company to hand over user details. In that regard having a secure anonymous connection between yourself and a server which resides outside of reach of said country is important even if the transaction with the final server is not anonymous.

    • by trawg ( 308495 )

      I strongly suspect that a lot of them are basically parts of botnets run by shady marketers to sell likes/follows/etc. Tor is probably just used to avoid tripping certain Facebook mechanisms of multiple logins per IP or something.

    • Yes, it's really about getting around firewalls, not giving you any sort of anonymity.

      To copy a great analogy another user made in the story about Facebook's .onion site launch, in terms of anonymity it's "like putting a condom over the car you drive to the whorehouse."

  • Headline: "Over 1 Million People Use Tor To Check Facebook Anonymously Each Month"

    Translation: "NSA Adds Over 1 Million People To Secret Watch List Each Month"

    • by lgw ( 121541 )

      Translation: "NSA Adds Over 1 Million People To Secret Watch List Each Month"

      I don't believe that for a second - that would imply there exists someone not already on that list!

    • Re:Translation (Score:4, Insightful)

      by rmdingler ( 1955220 ) on Friday April 22, 2016 @07:37PM (#51968845) Journal

      Headline: "Over 1 Million People Use Tor To Check Facebook Anonymously Each Month"

      Translation: "NSA Adds Over 1 Million People To Secret Watch List Each Month"

      Amen. More noise to sift through.

      The fear is that the initial outfits will collect and parse all of our information. This is not worth worrying over. The toothpaste is pretty much out of the tube... the collection of everything is efficient and ongoing.

      We are saved from a realistic fruition of the 1984 prophecy not by compassion, plenty of warning, or good governing; but by the endless, insatiable greed of the governors.

  • If they are accessing it anonymously surely it could just be one person accessing facebook one million times per month?
    (Or some other combination of multiple accesses by 1 million people.)

  • by Daniel Matthews ( 4112743 ) on Friday April 22, 2016 @07:29PM (#51968809)
    If I had a Facebook account I'd hide the fact too.

    Then again it could just be creepy basement denizens stalking the people they had a crush on back in their school days.
    • by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Saturday April 23, 2016 @12:49AM (#51970245)

      Or maybe people in Thailand speaking out against their king, people in China speaking out against their government, or people in Russia proclaiming their love to their homosexual partner.

    • Oh man. This comment made me register account on the website and only been two days since I started browsing the website. Really hit me. Like I've been browsing Facebook profile of girls which were in my high school and haven't talked interacted with them for the past 6 years. I still have a crush on the girl and been really depressed these days as in "I got nothing to show my worth". I'm literally in my mom's basement typing this. Like, holy shit. That stereotypical "mom basement dweller". Fuck my life. O
  • ... one guy uses Tor to check Facebook anonymously 1 million times per month.

    • by vux984 ( 928602 )

      ... one guy uses Tor to check Facebook anonymously 1 million times per month.

      No, facebooks knows who the million are.

      So the headline should be 1 million idiots used tor thinking they connected to facebook anonymously and here follows a list of their names, addresses, birthdays, favorite snack, last vacation they went on, and who their dentist is.

      • Maybe many of them created temporary accounts to post on more sensitive topics, and they don't log into them without tor. Or they've used this to hide their IPs despite giving away their ID. That might be useful as well.
  • hitting FB using tor is FUBAR!!!!!

    and will land you IN PRISON

    that illegal onion site you visited ( hacked by fbi) has a computer finger print of YOU

    then you log in to FB with a MATCHING electronic fingerprint and BOOM you are arrested

    loging into FB is a very FUBAR idea

  • I know this sounds like a stupid question but how does Facebook know someone is using tor? Is there a TOR bit set in some IP header somewhere that alerts them to it?

    • Facebook is on the TOR network in the sense that they run their own TOR service/node. Traffic coming from those can be (and very probably is) tagged correspondingly. They do not rely on third-party (aka NSA) provided exit nodes from the Tor network to the "general" internet which would not qualify as being "on Tor".
  • Two Facebook articles, only the one Microsoft article, what gives slashdot? Is it because without these two technological titans, the computing revolution we're experiencing today would never have happened.
  • I gave it a shot when I was learning how the .onion protocol works, and as soon as I logged in, it flagged the activity as suspicious and invalidated the cookie on all my other devices. It's not some uber-protective measure - it literally warned me that the login was suspicious.

    That's not what FB would do if it were trying to encourage opportunistic privacy. That the hidden service exists seems to just be to pay lip service to privacy advocates.

  • Assuming the number is accurate, that would be about 0.06% of facebook users.

    But what these people apparently don't realize is, that as soon as they log in, all anonymity is gone. Do they really think facebook doesn't communicate things like IP address or geolocation data, regardless of whether the communication goes through TOR? Even if that fails, it's really hard to escape the power of facebook's data analytics. They probably can identify you by that alone.

  • More like: 50,000 people use Tor to check Facebook 20 times each month. Though for Facebook addicts it wouldn't be 20 times in a month.

    So it's more likely: 5000 people use Tor to check Facebook 200 times a month.

    Big whoop there.

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