Facebook has confirmed that it will now begin using secure websites as its standard. The social networking giant broke news of its plans to switch entirely over to HTTPS pages in an official statement earlier this week.
The more secure pages, already widely used by governments, banks and other social media services, have been a goal for Facebook since at least 2011 when it said: "We hope to offer HTTPS as a default whenever you are using Facebook sometime in the future."
Users will now have option to use secure pages at all times or opt out and use standard HTTP pages:
"It is far from a simple task to build out this capability for the more than a billion people that use the site and retain the stability & speed we expect, but we are making progress daily towards this end. This may slow down connections only slightly, but we have deployed significant performance enhancements to our load balancing infrastructure to mitigate most of the impact of moving to HTTPS, and will be continuing this work as we deploy this feature," Facebook security policy manager Frederic Wolens tells techcrunch.com.