1M People Use Facebook Over Tor

Alec Muffet has done a lot of work to get Facebook running on TOR and he&#x27;s a true believer. I really enjoyed working with him when I was at Facebook. He also did a lot of work to get .onion domains to be recognized by registrars as a special purpose domain name. This let us issue certificates on .onion.<p>I don&#x27;t know if the story behind the facebookcorewwwi.onion domain name itself has been talked about much, but we wanted a memorable name for the domain so we took a new cluster that hadn&#x27;t been put in production yet and threw something like 500k cores at brute forcing onion names till we had a memorable domain name. Alec had a script that looked for hashes that started with facebook and then he picked the one that seemed to fit the most. And that&#x27;s how we have facebookcorewwwi.onion now.

Related: Please Facebook, let me peek over your walled garden. Taking a privacy-friendly stance, with the current Facebook, hurts my social life.<p>I do not trust your company, and I think you are bound to act unethically in the future. But I do not ask you to become a trustworthy ethical company. Mess with the accounts of my friends all you want. I just want to be invited to the next BBQ. People have stopped using e-mail for announcing these social events, and _all_ use Facebook. Could it be possible for me to not be on Facebook, yet still stay up-to-date on what my friends, or hell, even my parents now, are doing? A more advanced social graph API that hooks into email, RSS, Twitter, whatever... ?<p>I&#x27;m sure you also have my email-address from the address books of my contacts, so you could verify me.<p>As one of your longest non-users (I remember when TheFacebook required a Harvard-email for invite), please let me become a semi-user. It won&#x27;t pay you a dime, but it will make the world a better place.

Or 1 person uses 1M facebook accounts over Tor...

I&#x27;ve recently tried using FB via TOR (Browser) for the first time, but was unable. After entering the onion address and my FB credentials, I was informed that the account is temporarily blocked (presumably because of first access via TOR). I was presented with an option of unblocking it by recognizing a few photos of friends and matching them to names - but unfortunately, all those photos showed as blank, white squares!<p>So, I wasn&#x27;t able to login via TOR via the purposefully created .onion address. Also, sent an issue report via non-TOR login about this, but never got any response.<p>Note also that this seems to mean to me, that there may be people who are cut off from FB via TOR same as me, but who don&#x27;t even have a way to notify FB about the fact. And thus not having any chance of having the bug fixed.

Please explain it to me if I&#x27;m wrong, but doesn&#x27;t logging into Facebook on Tor defeat the purpose of Tor?

It&#x27;s funny that they say people use Tor &quot;for a variety of reasons related to privacy, security and safety&quot;. They left out &quot;firewall circumvention&quot;, which I have to believe is the #1 reason, at least in China.

I use &quot;Tinfoil for Facebook&quot; on my Android phone. It&#x27;s a wrapper around the mobile site with some extra features, and you can tell it to use &quot;Orbot&quot; (Tor client for Android), and you can tell it to use the onion address as well if you want (which I do). Which means I can use Facebook over Tor without using the official app which steals god knows what data from your phone.<p>You don&#x27;t get mobile notifications this way, so I just get my notifications via email instead. And I uploaded my public PGP key to Facebook, so the emails they send me are encrypted. Getting notifications via email also means that Facebook doesn&#x27;t even know if or when I&#x27;ve read a particular notification.<p>To read those encrypted emails on my phone I use K-9 Mail with OpenKeyChain. My Yubikey Neo acts like a smart card reader to my phone over NFC so I don&#x27;t need to give my phone direct access to my secret PGP key.<p>This setup works for me because I try to limit my Facebook usage, keep my number of &quot;friends&quot; on there to a minimum, and lie to Facebook whenever they want me to explicitly supply information.

Given Facebook&#x27;s real-name policy, and the fact that it&#x27;s literally a social network of your best friends, then since all Facebook pages are HTTPS anyway, the idea of using it over tor is... Uh... a bizarre<p>in theory the only thing you&#x27;re leaking over a plain https is, &quot;Hey this guy has friends.&quot; (this connection is visiting facebook).<p>meanwhile in theory I&#x27;d expect facebook to leak everything else on their end, because come on. I have next to zero expectation of privacy on facebook.<p>by that I mean you think people are planning terrorist plots over facebook? come on.<p>so I find the mashup of tor with facebook to be kind of bizarre.

I wish Google and Apple would roll out .onion Gmail and iCloud services, respectively.

Maybe bot networks are included in that number?

Does Google allow searches from Tor network? Last I heard it didn&#x27;t.

I wonder how many of these accounts are sock puppets?

I thought .onion addresses were for anonymous hidden services, which Facebook is not. What&#x27;s the advantage of accessing a .onion versus using Tor to visit the normal facebook.com?

and how many of those are for spam...?

Terrible title. I was wondering in what use case Facebook makes sense as an alternative to Tor