Slowly but surely social media sites are beginning to get the clue about the necessity of Internet security and launched with an always-on HTTPS setting for users. As many users access their Twitter accounts from not just home, but on-the-go and thus possibly unsecured WiFi hotspots it’s important to keep in mind that all that information is being broadcast in the clear.

Twitter already had a feature enabling HTTPS for those who knew it existed—accessible via https://twitter.com—but now users may also make certain that HTTPS will always activate when they log in by flipping a switch inside their user account.

“To turn on HTTPS, go to your settings and check the box next to ‘Always use HTTPS,’ which is at the bottom of the page,” Twitter writes on their blog on the subject. “This will improve the security of your account and better protect your information if you’re using Twitter over an unsecured Internet connection, like a public WiFi network, where someone may be able to eavesdrop on your site activity. In the future, we hope to make HTTPS the default setting.”

Also according to Twitter, certain activities on the social networking service always use HTTPS even if the user hasn’t flipped the switch. These activities include logging in, so that username and password login credentials are not open to the world and also when using the official Twitter iPhone and iPad mobile applications.

Other instances will not force HTTPS, possibly due to engineering issues where the programming has not spread yet. Mobile browsing users still must visit https://mobile.twitter.com as it doesn’t share code/equipment with twitter.com and thus isn’t affected by flipping the HTTPS switch. Twitter notes that they’re looking into a solution to this soon.

We’ve seen this become a bit of a debacle already for Facebook. In 2010 a lot of fears ran amok about hijacking of web sessions and thus the social networking giant enabled the ability for visitors to use HTTPS—however, they did it poorly and left those using it open to attack. In fact, the problem persisted as an issue where the web page didn’t enable SSL for the login (i.e. passing username and password login credentials) and this still left users open to attacks via tools such as Firesheep.

Only four months ago, Twitter received an ‘F’ in total security due to also lacking SSL authentication and hopefully that’s one thing that they’ve fixed with the always-on setting.