Comment by cubesnooper

I browse social media sites like Facebook and Reddit using their onion services. I was sick of seeing ads pop up that were clearly based on tracking my general browsing activity through IP correlation, tracking pixels and embedded “like” buttons. So now I block all cleartext Facebook/Reddit traffic completely.

Using Tor this way doesn’t anonymize me—on Facebook at least, I’m logged in under my own account—but it limits the profile Meta builds on me to the union of what it directly observes on Facebook and what it can purchase through data brokers. Ever since I started doing this, I’ve noticed a huge drop in relevance in my Facebook ads, so apparently it’s working. When the ads become suddenly relevant again (which has happened a few times), it exposes an information leak: usually a credit card purchase that Meta must have obtained from either my bank or the shop vendor and tied to my identity.

Using a VPN could theoretically provide the same benefit, but in practice Facebook tended to temporarily lock my account when using a VPN and Reddit blocks VPN traffic completely. So I stick to the onion services, which are run by the websites themselves and so are less likely to be treated as malicious traffic.

If you use these platforms, I recommend bookmarking their onion sites in Tor Browser and using it as your primary interface to them for a while. Then, if you don’t find it too inconvenient, start blocking the non‐onion versions of the sites on your network.

https://old.reddittorjg6rue252oqsxryoxengawnmo46qy4kyii5wtqn...

https://www.facebookwkhpilnemxj7asaniu7vnjjbiltxjqhye3mhbshg...

(P.S.: You shouldn’t trust the links I just posted; I could have posted fake ones! I recommend double‐checking against https://github.com/alecmuffett/real-world-onion-sites which links to proofs of onion site ownership under their usual domain names.)