Use HTTPS to Make Your Facebook and Twitter Accounts More Secure

Getting one of your social media accounts hacked can be very embarrassing and time consuming. One of the simplest things you can do to make your Facebook and Twitter accounts a bit more secure is to enable Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure or HTTPS.

HTTPS provides encrypted communication and secure identification for cross-web communications. This simply means that the stream of data going between your computer (or smartphone) and the sever it is connecting to across the web is encrypted. This makes it much harder to intercept and understand. HTTPS connections are often used for payment transactions on the World Wide Web and other sensitive online transactions.

You automatically use HTTPS when you login and access LinkedIn. Unfortunately, or both Facebook and Twitter, HTTPS is off by default.

To enable HTTPS in Twitter, go to “Settings”, click the “Account” tab and scroll all the way to the bottom and select “Always use HTTPS”.

In Facebook you can enable HTTPS by clicking on “Account” (top right), then on “Account Settings”, and then on check the “Account security (https)” checkbox.

You can tell you are using HTTPS as you will see “https” in the URL of the site you are accessing and your browser will display a “lock” icon in the status bar across the bottom of your browser window.

Changing these settings does not guarantee 100% security, but it does give you a bit more protection when you are using unsecured Wi-Fi.