Facebook Now Lets Tor Users Access Site Directly

You're probably not used to Facebook being cautious about your privacy. For a long time, they weren't, with several snafus leading to the release of private data in a very public way. The social giant has just taken a bold step in the opposite direction, though, and lent credence to a very private Internet portal along the way. If you prefer to do your web surfing via Tor, which lets you obfuscate your IP address and personal info, you'll now be able to access Facebook directly via a custom portal.

That's not to say you couldn't access Facebook via Tor before today, but doing so was a pretty terrible experience. Facebook accomplishes this by giving Tor users a straight pipeline into the datacenter. According to their blog post, "Facebook's onion address provides a way to access Facebook through Tor without losing the cryptographic protections provided by the Tor cloud."

Facebook has run afoul of privacy advocates lately, too, with their real-name snafu being the most public foot-in-mouth scenario. For those who feel the need to access the Internet quietly, and not be tracked, Tor is wonderful. Often times, Facebook's desire to know what you were doing (and where) caused some to think twice about visiting.

For a product the scale of Facebook, this is a unique move, but one we hope to see duplicated elsewhere. This also comes ahead of CEO Mark Zuckerberg's upcoming AMA on the site, so we're sure this will come up a few times there with regard to questions about privacy concerns.

If you want to visit Facebook via Tor, click HERE. Just remember that address only works with Tor browsers.

Source: Facebook