General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsPost-PRISM, Google Confirms Quietly Moving To Make All Searches Secure, Except For Ad Clicks
http://searchengineland.com/post-prism-google-secure-searches-172487Of course, if people had simply gotten in the habit of typing "https" 15 years ago, none of this would be an issue anyways...
In October 2011, Google began encrypting searches for anyone who was logged into Google. The reason given was privacy. Google said it wanted to block anyone who might potentially be eavesdropping on a string of searches made by an individual and also prevent the actual search terms themselves from being seen by publishers, as some of them might be too private to reveal.
Now, Google has flipped on encryption for people who arent even signed-in. When asked about this last week, Google confirmed the shift, saying:
We added SSL encryption for our signed-in search users in 2011, as well as searches from the Chrome omnibox earlier this year. Were now working to bring this extra protection to more users who are not signed in.
The author continues to some Q&A with a Google rep.
nebenaube
(3,496 posts)Recursion
(56,582 posts)It's what a lot of us have been calling for for years, since people apparently can't be bothered to use SSL themselves.
nebenaube
(3,496 posts)1 Merely using encryption makes the transmission more interesting.
2 SSL & VPN have both been shown to be compromised by NSA.
3 NSA would just get it from google anyway if they want it.
Now, this will reduce what a lay person can sniff from the packets. That is, unless they are determined.
Recursion
(56,582 posts)Those are descriptions of classes of technologies, neither of which have been "compromised"
nebenaube
(3,496 posts)just easily decrypted due to design flaws.
Recursion
(56,582 posts)I set all my TLS clients to require blowfish or twofish. It only occasionally causes problems.
BelgianMadCow
(5,379 posts)it became my homepage years ago instead of Google and I haven't gone back.
Your search data should never fall into the wrong hands.
The only real solution is quickly deleting your data or not storing them to begin with.
Since January 2009 we do not record our users' IP addresses anymore.
Your personal data are not shared with any third party.
We are the first and only search engine to do so.
Since then we have added many other features that protect your privacy.
http://www.ixquick.com
Recursion
(56,582 posts)My truly secure OpenBSD box has never at any point accessed Google.