Facebook’s mobile app now supports Tor

A little more than a year ago, Facebook made the rather surprising decision to allow users to access its website directly through Tor, and now the company is expanding on that by allowing Android users to use Facebook’s mobile app through Tor as well. According to the company, a sizable number of its users have started connected to it through the Tor network since it first enabled direct connections, and this new feature is a response to that popularity, although there aren’t any plans to bring the feature over to iOS.

We created a Tor onion address at https://www.facebookcorewwwi.onion/ in 2014 to make it easier for people to connect to Facebook securely from Tor-enabled browsers. This change increased the security of Tor connections to Facebook by eliminating steps that required traffic to travel beyond the cryptographic assurances provided by the Tor network. Since then, a sizeable community of people has grown to use this feature and help us make it more efficient and reliable. We commonly receive requests for additional platform support beyond the browser, and thanks to a project initiated by a summer intern at Facebook and subsequently picked up by our Protect and Care team in London, we are now offering experimental support for using Facebook over Tor via the Orbot proxy app for Android devices. We’re releasing this feature over the next few days to seek feedback which will help us create a great experience for using Facebook over Tor on Android. To get started you can head over to Google Play or the Orbot F-Droid repository and download Orbot: Proxy with Tor.