Foursquare enhances security by moving to HTTPS connections

Last night foursquare rolled out a change to their servers that moves all connections to HTTPS across their website, mobile site and all clients. It’s a proactive move to enhance security for all foursquare accounts.

HTTPS is a secure version of the HTTP protocol that powers the web. It encrypts web sessions with SSL, making Wi-Fi and other network connections much more secure, especially in light of the FireSheep plugin for Firefox that makes monitoring unsecured web traffic trivially easy (interestingly, FireSheep was developed by Eric Butler, who also created FoursquareX, a desktop foursquare client for Mac OS X).

Facebook and Twitter have recently rolled out HTTPS to their servers as an option, but the move by foursquare makes it the default for all connections. This increases security for everyone, regardless of how they connect to foursquare and without changing any settings.