More than half of all web page traffic is now encrypted, a milestone in an effort backed by everyone from Google to the federal government to encrypt the entire Internet.
The figure is based on a report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation released this week using data from the Chrome and Firefox web browsers. Mozilla and Google track the usage of the standard HTTPS encryption protocol based on data from users who opt in to share information.
As of Feb. 21, 51.3 percent of web pages that Firefox loads use HTTPS, according to results from Mozilla's Telemetry data-sharing program. Likewise, HTTPS covers more than half of the web pages loaded in Chrome across all operating systems, including Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android.
As TechCrunch notes, the encryption rallying cry has been taken up by organizations large, small, public, and private. And while encrypting more than half of all websites is significant, the modest and incremental goals that many of the organizations have set are an indication of the task's enormity.
Related
- The Best Encryption Software of 2017The Best Encryption Software of 2017
For example, the Obama administration previously mandated that all federal websites using the .gov domain use HTTPS by the end of 2016. That didn't happen, but the General Services administration is still working on it. Meanwhile, Google last year announced plans to place increasingly noticeable warning labels on unencrypted sites in Chrome, although they will gradually roll out across several successive Chrome builds.
In the meantime, the EFF offers an add-on for most mainstream browsers called HTTPS Everywhere that can force websites to serve HTTPS pages even if they would otherwise default to plain HTTP. It's a stopgap measure, though, according to the EFF.
"Our goal is a universally encrypted web that makes a tool like HTTPS Everywhere redundant," EFF researcher Gennie Gebhart wrote in a blog post. "Until then, we have more work to do."