Originally published 3/25/11 on lubbockonline.com/glasshouses
CIO Online reports that Facebook traffic coming from AT&T servers was accidentally routed through China and North Korea. This might not be a concern, but unless you're connecting to Facebook using an encrypted connection everything that you do can be monitored by network operators. China is known for spying on it's users, and once your data is on the Chinese network, it's just like any Chinese users data. Any data you look at on Facebook could be monitored and/or saved for later analysis as it goes through China.
But if you encrypt your data, the network operators can't see it. Encrypting your login to Facebook is easy. Just make sure your Facebook bookmark is set to "https://www.facebook.com" and everytime you login your username and password will be encrypted. But once you login Facebook defaults back to an unencrypted connection. Facebook does realize that you may want to have everything you do on Facebook encrypted, and have a setting to allow that. Go to the 'Account' menu,select 'Account Settings' and scroll down to 'Account Security' then click on 'change'. Check the "Browse Facebook on a secure connection (https) whenever possible" box.
It's almost always a good idea to use encryption on the web. It doesn't use much processing overhead and protects your information as it goes from point 'A' to point 'B'. If you use Firefox there's even an add-on called "https everywhere" that will use https to connect to any website that support https.
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