SSL (Semi Secure Link)
Privacy is largely a luxury that all of us have sacrificed in order to be online, as the recent Facebook privacy lapse makes abundantly clear. Still, as bad as social networks and other web sites can be about your privacy, you’re usually most vulnerable on your home network… which is why it’s always somehow comforting to see the SSL lock in the corner of your browser bar.
Google’s latest beta adds encrypted search to the mix to help protect your weird, illegal, esoteric or perverted queries from the eyes of anyone snopping around on your network. You just go to Google.com and proceed as usual, and your searches will be encrypted with SSL.
Google’s usually been pretty good about introducing SSL to their products — GMail and Google Docs have had it for a while — so it’s nice to finally see it come to their core business. It’s not rolled out across all search subsets, yet, hence the beta: images and maps, for example, don’t support SSL yet.
Nor can you rest easy about privacy when using Google SSL: they’re still collecting your search data, after all. But at least your neighbor can’t sniff out your zoophilic inquisitiveness anymore.
