Starting This July, Chrome Will Start Marking HTTP Sites As “not secure”

Beginning in July, Google Chrome will check all HTTP sites as “not secure,” as per a blog post by Chrome security product manager Emily Schechter. Chrome at present shows nothing about whether the site is secure or not with the version 68 coming, the program will caution site visitors with an additional notice in the address bar. If the site is secure, then you’ll see the green lock icon in the browser as usual.

But this isn’t the first time Google will be doing this because they had announced before now that HTTPS sites will be given a preference in search results. It would appear that many sites heeded Google’s 2016 advice as about 50 percent of web requests were HTTPS in 2016 but now Google wants to encourage the other 50 percent to migrate as soon as possible. Google Search started down-ranking unencrypted sites in 2015 and as they put it in the blog post, the new announcement is as because the adoption rate for HTTPS is on the rise with the hope that websites who want visitors would eventually consider migrating as quickly as possible.

According to Google, “Developers have been transitioning their sites to HTTPS and making the web safer for everyone. Progress last year was incredible, and it’s continued since then:

• Over 68% of Chrome traffic on both Android and Windows is now protected
• Over 78% of Chrome traffic on both Chrome OS and Mac is now protected
• 81 of the top 100 sites on the web use HTTPS by default”

HTTPS encryption secures the channel between the browser on your computer and the site guaranteeing nobody will be able to see data exchanges from your computer through your browser that you’re sharing with a site. You can buy an SSL service from your host company and once installed, you should see the green lock sign if you haven’t purchased it before and yes just like that, your site will be said to have HTTPS connection.

Services like WhatsApp and other messaging services have what’s called end-to-end encryption and what this means is that from your phone to say the WhatsApp server and then to your chat partner’s device and back to you, the entire chat is encrypted and this means someone at WhatsApp won’t be able to easily see what you’re chatting about. This also means government agencies with backdoor software won’t be able to see what you’re doing which has continued to fuel the security-privacy debate.