If you are lounging around at a café, Facebooking using their public wifi, note that a hacker with the right software can grab your login information and do you the favor of Facebooking for you, without your help. Realistically, his kind of hack is not very prolific, but it is easy to block, so it’s better to be safe than sorry. Since Facebook makes this simple setting unduly difficult, the following is a quick step-by-step (as of July 4, 2011).
- Go to the “Account” drop-down menu in the upper right of your Facebook page.
- Select “Account Settings”
- Expose the “Account Security” section
- Under the “Secure Browsing (https)” section select the checkbox next to “Browse Facebook on a secure connection (https) whenever possible”
- Click the “Save” button.
Now, when you log into Facebook, the browser will use the more secure HTTPS protocol to communicate with the Facebook servers rather than the, completely public, HTTP protocol.
Be aware of those Facebook apps that ask you to disable this secure setting and require you to log out and back in in order to re-establish the secure setting.