In the age of information, knowledge is – literally – power. Over the past few years, whistleblowers have come forward en masse to shed light on just how governments and corporations have been tracking and analyzing private browsing data – and people are only now waking up to the fact that their information is no longer exclusively their own. Even massive corporate giants like Google and Facebook have openly voiced concerns over the “unconstitutional” government surveillance of private individuals without prior reason or cause for suspicion.
Fortunately, the political powers of the world are not the only parties that get their say in the matter of unwarranted surveillance. More websites are rolling out encrypted, secure web protocols to protect visitors from surveillance every day. By using HTTPS instead of the standard text transfer protocols, companies can digitally scramble traffic between company servers and users, making the monitoring of data significantly harder for any third party. Following in the footsteps of smaller media outlets like Vice News and Techdirt, the Washington Post began encrypting parts of its website. At this time, the change to HTTPS is in an experimental phase, in which only the paper’s homepage, national security page and tech policy blog use the new protocol. The rest of the site is expected to make the transition over the coming months. Following massive breaches of data security, the White House has mandated that all federal websites must replace all web transfer protocol with the more secure protocol by 2016.
HTTPS is not a new fad in an ever-changing market; online banking, e-commerce and other sites with sensitive user information already use the protocol, by establishing private browsing sessions to prevent hackers and spies from unlawfully accessing and manipulating user data. Tech giants like Google, Facebook, and Twitter all saw stock values soar after announcements about decisions to use the new protocol. It is clear that the market for protected information is only just beginning to take root; Canadian networking equipment company Sandvine projected that more than half of all global web traffic would be encrypted by the New Year. The move does come with its consequences: advertisers using incompatible platforms may choose to promote their product elsewhere, and the Washington Post expects a temporary negative impact on its advertising revenue as advertisers decide if they want to rewrite their code to function with the new protocol.
Although not a major issue in most parts of the developed world, securing and encrypting internet data transfer is expected to open up channels of free information and speech in oppressed and politically unstable regimes. Cyber authorities will have few choices to control access to a particular webpage or discussion short of restricting access to the entire domain, and it will not be possible to identify and persecute individuals for their browsing habits. The debate around balancing national security against a right to privacy of personal information may have moved to a virtual ground, but the stakes remain just as real. It seems the issue of data privacy is as much a moral issue as a technological one.
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