[tor-talk] 1 Million People use Facebook over Tor

[Peter Tonoli]

This is a real success story for Tor, hopefully abating some of the 
negative publicity surrounding the use of Tor.

(from 
<https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-over-tor/1-million-people-use-facebook-over-tor/865624066877648>)

1 Million People use Facebook over Tor

People who choose to communicate over Tor do so for a variety of reasons 
related to privacy, security and safety. As we've written previously 
it's important to us to provide methods for people to use our services 
securely – particularly if they lack reliable methods to do so.

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.

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.

This 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.

Alec Muffett is a Software Engineer for Security Infrastructure at 
Facebook in London