Facebook offers 'dark web' Tor link for users that prefer to stay as anonymous as possible

Sign up to our free weekly IndyTech newsletter delivered straight to your inbox Sign up to our free IndyTech newsletter Sign up to our free IndyTech newsletter SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy policy Facebook has surprised the internet’s security community by offering a link to its website that works on Tor – an anonymizing program that is often synonymous with the “dark web”. Users accessing the site via Tor will not be anonymous to Facebook itself, which will still require individuals them to log in – most likely using their real names but will frustrate law enforcement or hackers watching a person’s computer. Runa Sandvik, a former Tor engineer who advised the social network on the project, told Wired that the change was a “huge benefit”: “You get around censorship and local adversarial surveillance, and it adds another layer of security on top of your connection.” Tor works by bouncing internet connections around a global network of users, making it extremely difficult for surveillance software to connect the dots between an individual’s computer and the sites they’re accessing. Prior to Facebook’s new Tor address this sort of connection pattern makes it extremely difficult for would-be anonymous users to access the social network: the site would see the connection jumping from country to country, assume the user had been hacked and block them.