Imagine you are browsing through your favorite social media channel, and see a cool product you feel you must have. You watch the video, click their site link, fish out your credit card, and prepare to type in your numbers.
Immediately you notice a warning: “Not Secure.”
Not wanting to be another identity theft statistic, you quickly abandon your cart. Has this scenario ever happened to you? Chances are that starting soon, Chrome’s new release will make this a lot more apparent.
Soon, Chrome will begin marking websites as “Not Secure” that use http. Instead, they should be using the securely encrypted https.
In the past, Chrome would warn users when they were asked to enter data on non-secure pages. Although it may seem like an annoyance, it is meant to protect visitors and website owners from being targets of simple hacking attempts that steal personal information or send users to a fake website. Google even uses this to better rank secure https websites above others for SEO.
The best way to understand http versus https websites is to consider mail. When you browse an http website, it is like sending a postcard where anyone can read the message along the way. But with an https connection, you can securely send that letter in a sealed envelope knowing the private information is meant only for the recipient. By sending data only using encrypted connections, you protect yourself from unwanted attacks.
So if you are a website owner, make sure you are protecting your visitors and data. You can do this by using a secure certificate and serving your website over https. Services like Let’s Encrypt provide the needed certificates at no charge. On the other hand, they require some server and website configuration to work properly. If you have any more questions about why this is important and how these upcoming Chrome updates could affect your website, reach out to us!
Read more on the Google Chrome update here.
Written by Blake Williams
