{"id":129532,"date":"2015-06-27T10:00:13","date_gmt":"2015-06-27T08:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/?p=129532"},"modified":"2015-06-26T13:38:39","modified_gmt":"2015-06-26T11:38:39","slug":"making-your-website-activity-more-difficult-to-track","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/security\/129532-making-your-website-activity-more-difficult-to-track.html","title":{"rendered":"Making your website activity more difficult to track"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This week has seen great progress in the effort to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.eff.org\/encrypt-the-web\">encrypt the web<\/a>.\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/blog.wikimedia.org\/2015\/06\/12\/securing-wikimedia-sites-with-https\/\">Wikimedia<\/a>, Microsoft&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.bing.com\/webmaster\/2015\/06\/15\/bing-moving-to-encrypt-search-traffic-by-default\/\">Bing<\/a> search engine, <a href=\"https:\/\/np.reddit.com\/r\/redditdev\/comments\/39zje0\/reddit_will_soon_only_be_available_over_https\/\">reddit<\/a>, and the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.fbi.gov\/\">Federal Bureau of Investigation<\/a> each announced plans to protect their site visitors by using secure HTTPS connections by default &#8211; or already have already adopted this policy.<\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;ve been talking to some of these organizations for years about the importance of delivering secure access to every user, and we&#8217;re thrilled that they&#8217;ve recognized its importance and taken this step. (Wikimedia, at least, will also use <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/HTTP_Strict_Transport_Security\">HSTS<\/a>\u00a0to enhance security.)<\/p>\n<p>Using an HTTPS connection helps protect the privacy of what people are doing online &#8211; making them more willing to read and write about controversial topics.<\/p>\n<p>It stops network operators from easily snooping on users&#8217; reading habits, profiling the users&#8217; activity within sites, invisibly altering or censoring web site content, or even injecting malware.<\/p>\n<p>Every month shows new reasons that these protections matter, whether it&#8217;s governments <a href=\"https:\/\/blog.wikimedia.org\/2015\/03\/10\/wikimedia-v-nsa\/\">snooping on the Internet backbone<\/a>, governments coopting site content to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wired.com\/2014\/03\/quantum\/\">attack site users<\/a> or <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Great_Cannon\">other unrelated web sites<\/a>, or ISPs inserting <a href=\"https:\/\/www.eff.org\/deeplinks\/2014\/11\/verizon-x-uidh\">tracking<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/arstechnica.com\/tech-policy\/2014\/09\/why-comcasts-javascript-ad-injections-threaten-security-net-neutrality\/\">ad content<\/a> into web pages.<\/p>\n<p>These sites join others that have gone all-HTTPS, including other major search, webmail, and social networking sites.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s a thrill to see the enthusiasm and momentum behind ubiquitous HTTPS today, including a <a href=\"https:\/\/https.cio.gov\/\">recommendation from the U.S. CIO<\/a> to use it on all Federal government web sites, a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/2001\/tag\/doc\/web-https\">recommendation from the World Wide Web consortium&#8217;s Technical Architecture Group<\/a> for its widespread deployment, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.eff.org\/deeplinks\/2015\/06\/strong-encryption-and-anonymity-are-guardians-free-expression\">recognition by the United Nations<\/a> of encryption&#8217;s role in protecting free expression, and of course the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.eff.org\/deeplinks\/2015\/06\/lets-encrypt-launch-plan-week-september-14-2015\">progress of our and our partners&#8217; own efforts to roll out the Let&#8217;s Encrypt Certificate Authority<\/a> in September.<\/p>\n<p>Let&#8217;s Encrypt will make it cheaper, easier, and faster for every site to turn on HTTPS.<\/p>\n<p>HTTPS alone can&#8217;t stop all Internet snooping and user profiling, and we need more research on how to protect communications metadata.<\/p>\n<p>But each of these sites is used every day to communicate about sensitive, private, and controversial topics, and now their users will be better protected.<\/p>\n<p><em>Source: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.eff.org\/deeplinks\/2015\/06\/what-do-wikipedia-bing-reddit-and-fbi-have-common\" target=\"_blank\">EFF<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n<h3 id=\"related\">More security news<\/h3>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/security\/125948-beware-of-these-tricks-criminals-use-to-steal-your-money-through-online-banking.html\"><strong>Beware of these tricks criminals use to steal your money through online banking<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/security\/125080-top-internet-attack-traffic-revealed.html\"><strong>Top Internet attack traffic revealed<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/security\/124848-worst-500-passwords-in-the-world.html\"><strong>Worst 500 passwords in the world<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Wikimedia, Bing, reddit, and the FBI announced plans to protect their site visitors by using secure HTTPS connections by default.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":341008,"featured_media":129538,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[1938,21797,2674,35,21905,8045,4696],"class_list":["post-129532","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-security","tag-bing","tag-eff","tag-fbi","tag-headline","tag-https","tag-reddit","tag-wikipedia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129532"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/341008"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=129532"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129532\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":129546,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129532\/revisions\/129546"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/129538"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=129532"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=129532"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=129532"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}