Facebook is embracing Tor

The folks behind Tor have been looking for ways to deal with the fact that much of the web treats Tor visitors differently. It’s a tough problem to solve because for all the benefits that Tor provides by allowing people to be anonymous, it’s also very much a tool that is abused by some for nefarious purposes, including spamming and attacks. For sites that have any sort of heuristic systems in place, it often defaults to treating many, if not all, Tor users as second-class citizens.

Facebook just took the surprising step of adding a way for users of the free anonymizing software Tor to access the social network directly. Tor is an open source project that launched in 2002 to provide a way for people to access the internet without sharing identifying information such as their IP address and physical location with websites and their service providers. People who download the free Tor software can visit websites while keeping the actual location of their computer and its make and model secret. While Tor users could previously access Facebook before today, it often loaded irregularly with incorrectly displayed fonts and sometimes didn’t load at all, because Facebook’s security features treated Tor as a botnet — a collection of computers designed to attack it.