Going dark: Facebook sets up deep web access for Tor users

Just a while ago, the world’s biggest social network launched an anonymous chatroom app, called Rooms. Now, it seems Facebook is creating an even more enabling environment for users opposed to divulging their personal data.

As reported by Wired, Facebook has launched a new version of its site which is accessible for users using Tor — the anonymous project that allows people to surf the web without giving up any personal data.

This is quite a curious step for Facebool, which lays claim to more than 1 billion active users each month. One thing that is certain though is that Facebook has been facing criticism in the last year, culminating with the controversial migration to its real-names policy a few months ago. This opened up dialogue on more secure alternatives, with the small experimental startup, Ello, sitting in the vanguard.

The following Facebook Onion address will be available to users with Tor-enabled browsers:

https://facebookcorewwwi.onion/

Of course, users won’t be anonymous when logging in — they still need to log in with their real names. According to Facebook’s Alec Muffett who’s a Software Engineer for Security Infrastructure, this will allow it to provide a way to “access Facebook through Tor without losing the cryptographic protections provided by the Tor cloud.”

Muffet says that this is merely the first step towards experimenting with the Tor network, and that there’s a lot more yet to come in the future:

Over time we hope to share some of the lessons that we have learned – and will learn – about scaling and deploying services via the Facebook onion address; we have many ideas and are looking forward to improving this service. A medium-term goal will be to support Facebook’s mobile-friendly website via an onion address, although in the meantime we expect the service to be of an evolutionary and slightly flaky nature.

Apart from being notorious as a platform for people selling drugs and porn online, Tor also enables users to circumvent censorship and surveillance. For an NSA paranoid era, this is very impressive. For censor-prone governments like China, this is a massive milestone.

Facebook is one of hundreds of popular websites currently blocked by the Chinese government.