14 DAY TRIAL // The Electronic Frontier Foundation applauded Microsoft’s decision to start encrypting Bing traffic by default and switch to HTTPS for search results, thus offering enhanced privacy protection to customers using its service.
In a statement released today, the EFF praised Microsoft and a few other organizations, including Wikimedia, reddit, and the FBI, for planning to switch to HTTPS by default, explaining that it’s very important for everyone to do whatever is needed to offer better protection to users.
“Using an HTTPS connection helps protect the privacy of what people are doing online - making them more willing to read and write about controversial topics. It stops network operators from easily snooping on users' reading habits, profiling the users' activity within sites, invisibly altering or censoring web site content, or even injecting malware,” the EFF says.
It could hurt advertisers
Microsoft admitted in a statement this week that its decision to switch to HTTPS could hurt advertisers and webmasters because they would no longer be able to collect data about the search queries that brought users on their pages.
To deal with this, Microsoft is offering limited information through its dedicated webmaster tools, as well as a new referrer to let webmasters know that traffic is originating from Bing.
“While this change may impact marketers and webmasters, we believe that providing a more secure search experience for our users is important. With this change, you will still be able to see Bing as the origin (referrer) of the encrypted traffic, though analytics tools you are using to analyze your traffic generally have their own, proprietary way of including this information in their search reports,” Microsoft explained.
EFF claims that switching to HTTPS is just the beginning of a more ambitious effort to stop Internet snooping and user profiling, but since everything can’t be performed overnight, all these changes that major tech companies are making come as very handy to users worldwide.