All Facebook users to be protected by HTTPS connections

In 2011, social networking site Facebook had announced that they will be rolling out HTTPS for all users. The website has now started making changes, as users will benefit from the higher level of security.

Shireesh Asthana who works for Facebook, said in a blog post that they will be providing HTTPS connections for their North American users first and will subsequently release it to the rest of the world.

HTTPS allows a user to access a site securely, as the connection between the user and the site becomes encrypted. This makes it tougher for hackers to eavesdrop on any data that is being exchanged between a user and the website.

Initially, the social-networking site used HTTPS only when passwords were being sent to it. Now however, the site administrators plan on using HTTPS as long as the user accesses the site. According to reports, Facebook had informed app developers that they had until October 1, 2011 to integrate HTTPS into their apps so as to better protect their user base.

Other sites such as Twitter, Hotmail and Gmail all use HTTPS. However, there is one side-effect of using HTTPS wherein pages taking longer to load, as a result of the technology behind encrypting and decrypting information.