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Google Says 64 Percent of Chrome Traffic On Android Now Protected With HTTPS, 75 Percent On Mac, 66 Percent On Windows (techcrunch.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the safety-first dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Google's push to make the web more secure by flagging sites using insecure HTTP connections appears to be working. The company announced today that 64 percent of Chrome traffic on Android is now protected, up 42 percent from a year ago. In addition, over 75 percent of Chrome traffic on both ChromeOS and Mac is now protected, up from 60 percent on Mac and 67 percent on ChromeOS a year ago. Windows traffic is up to 66 percent from 51 percent. Google also notes that 71 of the top 100 websites now use HTTPS by default, up from 37 percent a year ago. In the U.S., HTTPS usage in Chrome is up from 59 percent to 73 percent. Combined, these metrics paint a picture of fairly rapid progress in the switchover to HTTPS. This is something that Google has been heavily pushing by flagging and pressuring sites that hadn't yet adopted HTTPS.

2 of 90 comments (clear)

  1. Re: Well done! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Yeah, its not like letsencrypt offering automated certificates for free had anything to do with it.
    It was google showing a message about http being insecure.

  2. Re:Well done! by arth1 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Despite Google's other not so nice activities, I gotta give them a thumbs-up here. Getting the web to transition away from HTTP to HTTPS is fantastic. There's no reason for skimping on your web server anymore, encryption is easy and even crappy virutal machines can serve up HTTPS without issue. Good job Google.

    You're too quick go give them credit. Follow the money trail. HTTPS and SPDY makes it far easier to ensure that ads are transmitted, and to whom. That HTTPS largely defeats anonymous proxy caching and other techniques that makes counting ad impressions harder is why Google pursues it; security is how they sell it, despite it being slower, to a high degree defeats bandwidth saving techniques, and requires extra resources on both server and client endpoints.

    There's little reason why publicly available non-controversial information should be encrypted, and that makes up the majority of the web. Snooping traffic generally doesn't happen mid-transfer, but at the end point, by companies like Google and their partners. HTTPS does nothing to prevent that.