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Facebook Sets Up Shop On Tor

Posted by Soulskill on from the mixing-privacy-with-antiprivacy dept.

itwbennett writes: Assuming that people who use the anonymity network want to also use Facebook, the social network has made its site available on Tor, Facebook software engineer Alec Muffett said in a post on Friday. Facebook also decided to encrypt the connection between clients and its server with SSL, providing an SSL certificate for Facebook's onion address. This was done both for internal technical reasons and as a way for users to verify Facebook's ownership of the onion address. Since it is still an experiment, Facebook hopes to improve the service and said it would share lessons learned about scaling and deploying services via an onion address over time.

4 of 125 comments (clear)

  1. Anonymity? by MachineShedFred · · Score: 5, Interesting

    So you go through Tor to access Facebook, where you immediately have to log in, and...

    What's the point again?

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    1. Re:Anonymity? by pegr · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Oh, even better. What root CA is signing off on .onion domains now?

      Yet again, because people have no g*d damn clue how SSL works, we have to live with encryption that, in practice, is TOTALLY MEANINGLESS!

  2. Nice try NSA by rrohbeck · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Then all you have to do is enable Javascript to make Facebook work.

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  3. Re:Words. I can't even. by LessThanObvious · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It makes some sense. If you use a "real name like" pseudonym they don't know unless you get reported. Turn off ability of people to tag you in photos. Use a selfie that is recongnizable to friends, but useless for facial recognition algorithms. Never access outside TOR, blackhole DNS facebook.com and all known ad networks assuming that wouldn't break it within TOR. Register with a matching pseudonym email. Give a fake location and date of birth. Run AD-Blocker Plus, Ghostery, NoScript, etc.. Preferably dual boot, Live-CD or at least use different user login on the OS level when toggling between TOR and public use. For a normal person who wants to see what your friends are doing, but doesn't want to gave Facebook everything it could work good enough. As others mentioned, the ability to use in a country where it is banned is pretty worth while. If you are in that situation then maybe use a real photo at first if your friends need to recognize you to "add you", but change it later to a picture that isn't recognizable as you. It certainly matters for those in repressed countries to be able to communicate to the outside world. Tip: If you give a fake date of birth remember what you gave! I got locked out of mine because they used that as my only option for security question to access a stale account.