Facebook has for some time been providing ways for users to access the social network more securely, with one of those options being support for Tor, the anonymous communication network.
Now the company reports that more than 1 million people are using Tor in conjunction with their Facebook accounts. While that group represents a tiny fraction of Facebook's overall user base, it's been growing quickly, according to an official blog post:
[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.
Over this period the number of people who access Facebook over Tor has increased. In June 2015, over a typical 30 day period, about 525,000 people would access Facebook over Tor e.g.: by using Tor Browser to access www.facebook.com or the Facebook Onion site, or by using Orbot on Android. This number has grown – roughly linearly – and this month, for the first time, we saw this “30 day” figure exceed 1 million people.
Analysis: When It Comes to Facebook, Tor Is About Security, Not Privacy
It's easy to spot the bit of incongruity between using an anonymous browsing technology to access a website such as Facebook, which has a business model based on collecting PII (personally identifiable information)
"Using Tor to protect your privacy on Facebook is like using an armored car to deliver your life savings to Bernie Madoff," says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Steve Wilson.
"They call Tor a privacy enhancing technology, but it's a very specific secrecy technology," Wilson says. "All it does is cover your tracks and prevent a third party monitoring you. And that's important for journalists, political activitists, some protesters and so on. But day-to-day privacy is all about what the second party is doing with your personal information. And when it's Facebook, using Tor is ironic at best."
"Encryption end-to-end is absolutely essential and it's great that many apps are building that in now," Wilson adds. "However, that's security and not privacy."
"Privacy is restraint," Wilson says. "Privacy is knowing that the site you're visiting is not going to take your personally identifiable information and exploit it behind your back. That they're going to explain what they do with your PII and why, and that they won't collect more PII than they really need."
Technology really plays a small part when it comes to true privacy, he adds: "Instead, privacy requires respectful business models, and consumer protection-style regulations that guard against unscrupulous practices. Like product safety and pollution control, a degree of regulation is needed for privacy. Consumers cannot be left to fend for themselves online. Things like Tor come from an everyone-for-themselves digital mindset. But the Internet is no longer some Wild West."
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