Google released its encryption methods as a new metric in its transparency reports, specifically on the use of HTTPS encryption on requests forwarded to its servers, detailed in a Fast Company report. Together, Google estimates those other sites account for about 25 percent of all Web traffic.
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While Google still has some way to go to reach total encryption, it’s doing better than most of the non-Google sites featured in the report.
A Google spokesperson said that Driver, Gmail and Service have been offered for a long time over HTTPS, and over the past year, the company has started to add traffic from other products such as Blogger and ads.
“Our aim with this project is to hold ourselves accountable and encourage others to encrypt so we can make the web even safer for everyone” , affirmed Google encryption “evangelists” Rutledge Chin Feman and Tim Willis. YouTube traffic is now not included in this data.
Google shone a spotlight on encryption less a week before Apple and the United States government are to face off in federal court in Southern California in a legal fight to force the company to break into an attacker’s iPhone.
Certain countries and organizations block or otherwise degrade HTTPS traffic.
Older hardware and software do not support modern encryption technologies. So, several tech companies including Facebook and Snapchat recently pledged that they would make their services’ encryption even stronger.
Google, owned by Alphabet Inc., says it’s still trying to overcome some of the technical problems that have made it more hard to encrypt some of its services.
In other cases, smaller organizations may not have the desire or technical resources to implement HTTPS. “Unfortunately, these devices may no longer be updated and may never support encryption”, Google wrote in the report.
Meanwhile, HTTPS which is a protocol for secure communication over a computer network had been widely considered as one of the keys to a safer internet, but only with its broad implementation. Aiming to shed some light on how much progress has been made so far, on Tuesday launched a new section of its transparency report dedicated to encryption.
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Google has added a new category to its transparency report that serves to keep track of the internet’s encryption efforts. For example, North America still leads the world in unencrypted traffic, with over 95 percent of that data from mobile devices.
