On October 1, 2011 Facebook officially announced that they will require a valid SSL Certificate for all pages, applications and basically all data that is hosted outside of Facebook servers. Actually, what does this mean exactly and do you need to be concerned? The answer depends mainly on the way you use Facebook. The SSL requirement closely concerns regular users, developers and business owners. In this article we will provide some more information about what an SSL is, how different users are affected by this Facebook requirement and how to use your SSL with your Facebook Fan Page.
- What is an SSL Certificate?
This is a security certificate and the abbreviation stands for Secure Socket Layer. This is a technique to encrypt digital information, so that users' private data is protected when transferred along computer networks. Usually, SSL certificates are used by banks, e-commerce institutions and business entities that work with confidential information. SSL is the de-facto standard for securing computer communications and it provides a certain level of peace of mind.
- Why Facebook decided to implement this drastic change?
Facebook decided to make this change in order to protect you from having your information stolen. Hijacking requires certain skills, but it is now easier because of some recent releases of more sophisticated spying programs. The so-called Social Engineering becomes very popular among hackers and Facebook developers want to reduce the number the cases when someone's account is stoled, hacked or used by hackers.
- How will I be affected by the change?
As we have already mentioned the answer to this question depends on the way you use Facebook. If you are a regular Facebook use and you use the platform only to check out your friends' pages and regular fan pages you will not notice any changes. If you use games or you visit special Facebook pages you may notice some SSL warnings. These warnings appear when a Facebook fan page includes content from a website which is not hosted on Facebook servers and the data is not transmitted via an SSL connection. In such cases you can simply switch to a non-SSL connection or accept to see the content without SSL.
However, if you are a developer who creates special Facebook pages or a business owner you may experience some problems that will definetely affect your Facebook fan page and your visitors. The problem is related to the way data is transmitted from your website to the fan page and vice versa. For example, suppose that you have a fan page and on it you want to display in an HTML iframe a product from your e-commerce website. If your e-commerce site doesn't use a private SSL certificate your Facebook visitors will see a warning message. The problem is that most people don't understand the technical details and they simple leave such pages. In this case you need to ensure that such SSL warnings will not be displayed at all. Please check the next section of this article for more details how to use your Hostlantern SSL with your Facebook fan page.
- How to use my Hostlantern SSL with my Facebook Fan page?
Now that we have already discussed the SSL problem we need to describe how to resolve it. Actually, if you have an SSL from Hostlantern this is pretty easy. For example, let's suppose that on your Facebook page you want to use the following page from your site:
http://mywebsite.com/products
To do this you should use HTTPS instead of the default HTTP protocol. Login to your Facebook and then go to:
https://developers.facebook.com/
If you have already created your application you can click on it and find the "App on Facebook" section. There is a field called "Secure Canvas URL". In this field you should type the address that you want to use but use HTTPS. For example:
https://mywebsite.com/products
Then find the "Page Tab" section and paste the same address in the "Secure Page Tab URL" field. Sometimes if you want to display a specific HTML document you may need to specify it too. For example if the HTML document which you want to use for your Facebook demo fan page is called "demo.html" you need to type the following address in the "Secure Page Tab URL" field:
https://mywebsite.com/products/demo.html
Finally, save all settings and you should not see SSL warnings when you open your Facebook fan page or application.
If you have any questions or you are experiencing difficulties configuring your SSL or Facebook Fan page please let us know. We will do our best to assist you!
