Boosting protection of Internet users’ personal data from snooping advertisers & 3rd-party trackers, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today announced it had enhanced its 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 & a key component of EFF’s effort to encrypt the Web & make the Internet ecosystem safe for users & Website owners,” said EFF in a press release.
“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 & Certbot Web encrypting projectsm in a statement.
“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.
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 & information vulnerable to attacks.
Image credit: DuckDuckGo
