Starting on Tuesday, the million or so third-party applications that use Twitter data must start encrypting all of their communications with the Twitter API, in order to improve security and maintain data integrity. In a short message posted on its service, Twitter announced that, as of Jan. 14, all data requests sent to the Twitter API must be done through the SSL (Secure Socket Layer) protocol, or its successor, the TLS protocol.

Developers whose apps are still using HTTP plaintext connections to connect to Twitter’s API feeds may find their applications broken from today. Twitter has enforced new rules for developers to enhance privacy for end users, which from 14 January will see it block connections to all its API URLs for apps that have not enabled TLS (Transport Layer Security)/ SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) encryption.