Let’s face it: Facebook has way too much dirt on most of us. In our eagerness to show family, friends, acquaintances, and some people we’ve never met, our photos, relationship status, and Farmville achievements, we all kinda forgot that we were putting this data on the internet. Alarmist italics aside, we love our Facebook and we need to do all we can in this fool’s errand of keeping our massive stash of personal data private.
Ok, so you’re already pretty careful about what you post, you’re diligent about setting permissions on your updates, photos, notes, etc., and you try real hard not to accidentally friend people who don’t exist. As careful as you are with your privacy settings, the danger still exists of the data passing between your browser and Facebook being intercepted in-transit. You need encryption.
Don’t worry, it’s pretty simple to implement. Facebook has finally done what they should have years ago, and released a new security option to allow users to connect to their site exclusively with HTTPS. Congratulations Facebook: welcome to the year 1998.
Go to your Facebook account settings and find this section:
Wuh-ho! Get a load of that Secure Browsing option! That means that all traffic between your computer and Facebook’s server will be encrypted. Also when you connect to Facebook, it presents your browser with a security certificate proving that it is, in fact, Facebook and not a man-in-the-middle. Pretty snazzy.
Though this option doesn’t grant you absolute immunity, it greatly reduces the chances of your data being captured by a third party and is a must-set for all Facebook users. Honestly I don’t know why they don’t make it mandatory.