Google wants encrypted websites to become the norm to improve privacy and security, and it's using its browser to push that agenda to hundreds of millions of people who use it. Starting with Chrome 56, due in January 2017, the browser will present a "not secure" alert on websites that handle passwords and credit card numbers insecurely, so those warning are only going to get more frequent and threatening.
It's a small, not terribly controversial change. Website encryption was invented more than two decades ago precisely so this kind of information could be secured to enable e-commerce. But this is just a first step in
Google's plan to get us all to think of unencrypted websites as flawed, not ordinary.
The FBI may not like it, but Google's pro-encryption stance is increasingly common. As we live more and more of our lives online, building better privacy into the global internet seems sensible.
Chrome already quit allowing the use of Java since Java is a programing language and can be used to alter or even take control of another person's computer.
Unfortunately Java is the basis of a lot of game sites like Gamehouse (a very popular game site) so when my customers changed over to Google Chrome those sites would no longer work.
To fetch website content from where it's stored on a web server, your browser uses the
foundational technology called HTTP, or
Hypertext Transfer Protocol. For encrypted website communications, though, browsers use a secure version called HTTPS. To encourage website developers to move from HTTP to HTTPS, Google gradually will spread the Chrome "not secure" warning to any website delivered over HTTP, not just those with passwords and credit card numbers.
"Chrome currently indicates HTTP connections with a neutral indicator. This doesn't reflect the true lack of security for HTTP connections,"
said Emily Schechter, a member of the Chrome security team, in a blog post Thursday. "When you load a website over HTTP, someone else on the network can look at or modify the site before it gets to you."
