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Over 1 Million People Use Tor To Check Facebook Anonymously Each Month (techcrunch.com)
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."
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.
am I missing something here???
<whisper> Facebook still knows its you. </whisper>
Some people not even use computers and starve to death while all those bastards eat, shit and die in this cyber prison only to behold all those fat millionary sick jokes.
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"
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
It's slow enough that it satisfies your need to reminisce for the good ole days of dial up.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
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.)
I know you're trolling, but here's a serious answer anyway.
there's no reason you need to using T.O.R.
Only in the sense that there was "no reason Rosa Parks needed to ride on the front of the bus".
I won't comment on the dubious wisdom of logging into Facebook under TOR. But in a general sense, anything that frustrates the surveillance state and returns power from the state back to individuals has critical social benefits that make it worthwhile, even if it is inconvenient.
There's "no reason" only if you don't give a shit about human rights.
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.
In some places, using Facebook is itself illegal.
Perhaps I perceive that anonymity is a right to privacy issue that is constitutionally protected.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
I know you're trolling, but here's a serious answer anyway.
there's no reason you need to using T.O.R.
Only in the sense that there was "no reason Rosa Parks needed to ride on the front of the bus".
I won't comment on the dubious wisdom of logging into Facebook under TOR. But in a general sense, anything that frustrates the surveillance state and returns power from the state back to individuals has critical social benefits that make it worthwhile, even if it is inconvenient.
There's "no reason" only if you don't give a shit about human rights.
No, OP is right. It's not about sticking it to THE MAN, its about logging into your girlfriends FB account to see if she's steppin' out on you untraceable like.
What good is a VPN when you're visiting the pages of your friends & family?
They don't NEED to trace down your internet connection to figure out who you're connected to!
Over a million morons defeat the purpose of Tor and tag their session to a identifiable identity providing useful metadata which allows encrypted streams to be statistically analysed and a probability assigned to the traffic helping big data systems uniquely identify them through behavioural analysis.
Facebook is not your friend...its a friend of gov.
The reason for accessing Facebook over TOR is noise. The more innocuous traffic on TOR, the harder it gets for anybody looking for the less innocuous stuff.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
Looks to me that much of the tor traffic to fb is from the asses that clone accounts unde a new misspelled name, ask to be friended and then send messages asking for money. Their scam only works when tracking back to the IP is difficult.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
"Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say" -- Edward Snowden
... one guy uses Tor to check Facebook anonymously 1 million times per month.
Slashdot is deleting comments!
I cannot overstress the importance of stopping this!
Indelible, uneditable comments are Slashdot's last redeeming value! Without it all is lost!
Please, help spread the word, and maybe we can nip this in the bud.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
What were the comments about?
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
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 don't pitch OpenSUSE Linux to my friends, i let Microsoft do it for me
Great quote. A comprehensive exploration of the topic is in: Nothing to Hide by Daniel J. Solove, a legal scholar.
Well, it's a good thing that 40% of American university students don't agree with free speech and don't understand why we have it. "Free speech" is just a cover for bigots to broadcast hate speech. It needs to go away along with all the other crazy right-wing ideas like the Constitution and separation of powers.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
+1 I would like to know more about this too.
Forget about it. Nobody cares.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
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?
You, sir, are a grade-A moron.
The government might care about you specifically but they still log everything you access online. At least they do where I come from. You conveniently overlook that they might start being interested in you for any random reason.
What concerns me is what happens when laws change. I am concerned the government will go back through those logs because they can find people who previously engaged in legal behaviours and surveil them to see if they continue to engage after the behaviour has become unlawful.
I am concerned that the government will present those logs out of context to prove a crime when none existed. Perhaps I saw sarin gas in Homeland and looked it up on Wikipedia.
Perhaps the world isn't all USA and other government ban the use of Facebook. Those same governments are big on summary executions and what not.
Who are you, Sir Moronsalot, to judge other people's reasons to remain anonymous?
You gave up your right to privacy the moment you aquired a mobile phone and were being issued a credit/debit card.
Tracking you everywhere you go, as long as the phone is emitting a signal, is trivial. Using the credit/debit card leaves a more distinct track.
I'm not saying that you, the individual, are being monitored on purpose by any lettered agency, but the records exist and can (an will, in the near future) be used to compose a very accurate profile.
Now where's my damned tinfoil hat???
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.
OK, no comments are being deleted, then.
Ezekiel 23:20
If you're not paid counterintel, you don't need to post that as AC.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I gave it a shot when I was learning how the .onion protocol works, and as soon as I logged in, it flagged the activity as suspicious and invalidated the cookie on all my other devices. It's not some uber-protective measure - it literally warned me that the login was suspicious.
That's not what FB would do if it were trying to encourage opportunistic privacy. That the hidden service exists seems to just be to pay lip service to privacy advocates.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
What is this "computing revolution" you're referring to?
You're probable one of those people who think Bill Gates wrote DOS in his garage, and Steve Jobs invented the mouse.
Let me fix that headline...
Over 1 million people use Tor.
There... That they check Facebook is probably a habit alongside jde any other website they visit.
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.
Use an anonymizing service to log into a personal profile. That's REAL smart.
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 feel sorry for you if you actually believe that.
Facebook has no relevance in today's society. People communicated with one another through Email and chat boards for decades before Zuckerberg stole the idea of Facebook from his roommate and used it to profit from people's sense of self importance.
Microsoft only created a revolution by crushing their opponents through unethical business practices. Had they been properly punished for those practices then others (i.e. actual competition) would have succeeded. The revolution would still have happened even if Microsoft never existed. Remember both Microsoft and Apple stole the concept of a graphic user interface from Xerox Parc.
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 feel sorry for you if you actually believe that.
Facebook has no real relevance in today's society. People communicated through email and chat boards for decades before Zuckerburg stole the idea of Facebook from his roommate and used it to profit from people's sense of self-importance.
Microsoft only created a parody of a computing revolution by using unethical business practices to crush competition. Had they been properly penalized by the courts for their behaviour, others would have succeeded. The computing revolution would still have occurred had Microsoft never existed. Remember both Microsoft and Apple stole the concept of a graphical user interface from Xerox Parc.
Modified Miranda for your brave new world:
You are under arrest for violation of the Thoughts Contrary To The State and Expression of Opinion act. You will remain silent. Anything you say, or that we claim you said can be held against you. You may not consult with an attorney. If you attempt to do so you will be considered guilty as charged.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.