Starting today, we have enabled HTTPS across the entire oDesk site, giving our users an extra layer of security.  Our logged in pages were already fully encrypted, and thus your logged in sessions have always maintained a significant level of privacy.  But, as people spend more time on the Internet, many banking and e-commerce sites are adding SSL encryption across their sites – both logged in and non logged in pages – as a standard practice.  We too want to ensure our users have the highest level of protections available across our entire site.

To use the new fully encrypted HTTPS wide site, just go to www.odesk.com as you normally would.  We will default you to our new full HTTPS site.

For more information on HTTPS, see the “HTTP Secure” article on Wikipedia for complete details.  Basically, HTTPS is a protocol that establishes a secure connection between your browser and our servers.   In contrast, HTTP is unsecured and is subject to man-in-the-middle and eavesdropping attacks which can let attackers gain access to website accounts and sensitive information.  HTTPS is designed to withstand such attacks and is considered secure against such attacks.

Special information for API users. All of our public APIs are currently available over HTTPS.  To start using the HTTPS versions, please just update your app to use HTTPS rather than HTTP.

Special information for Internet Explorer Users (IE 7 & IE 8). We are aware of a Security Warning box that appears when you land on one of the contractor search or contractor profile pages.  This is not actually a security issue and you are safe to view the oDesk pages.  We have made these changes specifically to improve security.  We will be fixing this issue over the next 24 to 48 hours.  In the meantime we recommend using Firefox or Chrome as your browser.  Or, you can disable this warning message in IE by going to the Tools menu, selecting Internet Options, and clicking the Security tab.  Select Custom level, and scroll down half way to “Display mixed content” and change the button to Enable.

To share your feedback and discuss these changes with the community, please visit our forum post here.