1 Million People Now Use Tor to Access Facebook

Tor, the anonymizing network, is presently used by a lot of people, who want to access all kinds of online services without revealing their identity. However, there is some legitimate use as well. For instance, Facebook.

On Friday, Facebook announced that more than one million people accessed Facebook through the Tor network in the last 30 days, whereas in June 2015, around 525,000 people used the Tor browser to access Facebook., According to Facebook, traffic has grown roughly linearly since then.

“People who choose to communicate over Tor do so for a variety of reasons related to privacy, security and safety…It’s important to us to provide methods for people to use our services securely — particularly if they lack reliable methods to do so,”

Facebook software engineer Alec Muffett wrote in a blog post.

“This is why in the last two years we built the Facebook onion site and onion-mobile site, helped standardise the “. onion” domain name, and implemented Tor connectivity for our Android mobile app by enabling connections through Orbot.”

The company began to provide its own .onion address for the ease of Tor users back in 2014. In fact, Facebook has included more ways to access its platform on the dark web over time.