Hidden services running on the Tor network got major support on Friday when Facebook began offering Tor users a way to connect to its services and not run afoul of the social network’s algorithms for detecting fraudulent usage of accounts.
On Friday, the company added a hidden service address with a .onion top-level domain, facebookcorewwwi.onion
[updated to fix address], which allows Tor users to protect their data and identity all the way to Facebook’s datacenters. Hidden services accessed through the Tor network allow both the Web user and website to remain anonymous.
“Facebook’s onion address provides a way to access Facebook through Tor without losing the cryptographic protections provided by the Tor cloud,” Alec Muffett, a software engineer with Facebook’s security infrastructure group, said
in a blog post. “It provides end-to-end communication, from your browser directly into a Facebook datacenter.”
