Twitter on November 22 announced it has toughened the encryption of traffic at the globally popular one-to-many messaging service to thwart online snooping. Twitter followed in the footsteps of Google and Facebook, adding a layer of security called Perfect Forward Secrecy to protect data that users would like kept from prying eyes.
"On top of the usual confidentiality and integrity properties of HTTPS, Forward Secrecy adds a new property," Twitter explained in a blog post.
"If an adversary is currently recording all Twitter users' encrypted traffic, and they later crack or steal Twitter's private keys, they should not be able to use those keys to decrypt the recorded traffic."
The non-profit Electronic Frontier Foundation is among online rights champions who advocate for this kind of added protection on personal Internet traffic, according to San Francisco-based Twitter.
"We are writing this not just to discuss an interesting piece of technology, but to present what we believe should be the new normal for web service owners," Twitter said of the announcement.