San Francisco, California—Boosting protection of Internet users’ personal data from snooping advertisers and third-party trackers, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today announced it has enhanced its groundbreaking HTTPS Everywhere browser extension by incorporating rulesets from DuckDuckGo Smarter Encryption.
The partnership represents the next step in the evolution of HTTPS Everywhere, a collaboration with The Tor Project and a key component of EFF’s effort to encrypt the web and make the Internet echo system safe for users and website owners.
“DuckDuckGo Smarter Encryption has a list of millions of HTTPS-encrypted websites, generated by continually crawling the web instead of through crowdsourcing, which will give HTTPS Everywhere users more coverage for secure browsing,” said Alexis Hancock, EFF Director of Engineering and manager of HTTPS Everywhere and Certbot web encrypting projects. “We’re thrilled to be partnering with DuckDuckGo as we see HTTPS become the default protocol on the net and contemplate HTTPS Everywhere’s future.”
“EFFs pioneering work with the HTTPS Everywhere extension took privacy protection in a new and needed direction, seamlessly upgrading people to secure website connections,” said Gabriel Weinberg, DuckDuckGo founder and CEO. “We’re delighted that EFF has now entrusted DuckDuckGo to power HTTPS Everywhere going forward, using our next generation Smarter Encryption dataset.”
When EFF launched HTTPS Everywhere over a decade ago, the majority of web servers used the non-secure HTTP protocol to transfer web pages to browsers, rendering user content and information vulnerable to attacks.
EFF began building and maintaining a crowd-sourced list of encrypted HTTPS versions of websites for a free browser extension— HTTPS Everywhere—which automatically takes users to them. That keeps users’ web searching, pages visited, and other private information encrypted and safe from trackers and data thieves that try to intercept and steal personal information in transit from their browser.
Fast forward ten years—the web is undergoing a massive change to HTTPS. Mozilla’s Firefox has an HTTPS-only mode, while Google Chrome is slowly moving towards HTTPS mode.
DuckDuckGo, a privacy-focused search engine, also joined the effort with Smarter Encryption to help users browse securely by detecting unencrypted, non-secure HTTP connections to websites and automatically upgrading them to encrypted connections.
With more domain coverage in Smarter Encryption, HTTPS Everywhere users are provided even more protection. HTTPS Everywhere rulesets will continue to be hosted through this year, giving our partners who use them time to adjust. We will stop taking new requests for domains to be added at the end of May.
To download HTTPS Everywhere:
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
For more on encrypting the web:
https://www.eff.org/encrypt-the-web
For more from DuckDuckGo:
https://spreadprivacy.com/eff-adopts-duckduckgo-smarter-encryption/
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is the leading nonprofit organization defending civil liberties in the digital world. Founded in 1990, EFF champions user privacy, free expression, and innovation through impact litigation, policy analysis, grassroots activism, and technology development. We work to ensure that rights and freedoms are enhanced and protected as our use of technology grows. Visit https://www.eff.org