With user data security and privacy becoming all the more important, you will be happy to know that Google has just announced that the traffic of YouTube is now 97% encrypted. As reported by Google Developers blog, Google has decided to enhance encryption by giving it a boost. The result is that 97 percent of YouTube traffic is now encrypted using HTTPS (Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol Secure).
One obvious question that arises is why it took so long for Google to reach this level of encryption. Google said there were three main reasons why it was delayed –
-To account for different types of devices that the HTTPS needs to be functional on.
-Heavy traffic YouTube receives every day.
-Number of mixed content the website gets every day.
YouTube videos can be watched on all devices – from flip phones to Smart TVs. Google had to test HTTPS on every device to ensure users would not run into trouble. The company also found that HTTPS improved the quality of experience on most clients by ensuring content integrity. Google Global Cache serves a massive amount of video and migrating it all to HTTPS is no easy task. The company also mentioned that it gets an alert when an insecure request is made from any of its clients and that the company takes necessary steps to block the mixed content.
Also check: How to Fix “this video is not available in your country” on YouTube
The other obvious question that arises is why stop at 97% and not go further? Google has also answered this question. The answer is that some devices presently do not support the modern HTTPS. According to Google developers blog, any non-secure HTTP (websites that don’t have HTTPS) traffic is vulnerable to attacks. All websites and apps should, therefore, be protected with HTTPS, the blog said. It also requested developers to migrate to HTTPs, if they haven’t already done so.
Here’s the video by Google Developers about deploying HTTPS –