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Comment by myf01d | Hacker News Reader

Advancing HTTPS is one of a few good things Google made in the recent years. Thanks Google.

It's one of the few things they do that I can't find a reason they would be financially motivated to do so, other than increase developers' opinions about the company as a whole, which is a good thing for all.

google competes with the likes verizon, comcast and at&t, and the data google gathers on you is very valuable. why would they want to share that data with the line operators for free?

sorry to say, but https is not an altruistic move by google.

underrated comment

And since a large majority of websites import either google analytics or google words, google gets all the infomation for https websites anyway.

I'm willing to bet that the terms and conditions for both services allow google to reuse use the analytics infomation.

I can understand why they would want to convince everyone to use HTTPS to restrict access of your data from their competitors, but it limits the data they can collect as well. HTTPS has stricter cross domain policies so their ads would gather less information and their Fiber ISP would no longer be able to collect data by tapping connections. But on average, I think you're right that HTTPS would restrict more of your data to Verizon etc than to Google.

Exactly. My understanding of the push towards HTTPS by Google is that they control the websites more than they control the connectivity, so they want to make sure that ISPs can only aspire to be substitutable intermediaries between users and websites. Putting everything in HTTPS makes traffic opaque to ISPs.

This is ascribing an absurd level of Machiavellian intent to Google. Why can't people just accept that occasionally, Google engineers do stuff that isn't profitable to the parent company?

Just speculating, but I think Google is at such a huge scale whenever the internet wins Google wins. That's why they're trying to improve internet access with Project Loon and WiFi in Indian railway stations.

If privacy improves that will benefit the internet (privacy has real costs that don't involve state actors like hackers, etc). Many people, especially in developing countries, are afraid of transactions over the internet and use cash on delivery.

This is a long term, strategic decision.

Better security = Greater trust of the web = Higher adoption = More ads.

No different to them working on Google Fiber.

I can think few.. Adware substituting their adsense ads for theirs, also isps messing with ads etc.

In addition to all the genuine "let's make the web better" reasons, comprehensive TLS prevents middleboxes from inspecting or tampering with traffic, which in turn allows the introduction of better protocols like SPDY and HTTP/2, which brings content to users faster and allows pages that contain more disparate/modular content, which makes web applications more capable (in addition to the added security), which makes it easier and more appealing to migrate away from locked-in platforms. (And that's just one of many lines of reasoning.)

Thanks let's encrypt.

Google should've started way way earlier

How early? Put a year on it. What should they have done, and when?

If Google hasn't threatened people that ranking will sink if they didn't migrate to HTTPS, Let's Encrypt wouldn't have been so popular despite the fact it's free due to the pseudointellecutal SEO "muh performance hit, muh redirect rules" meme

I work for google, and i had a fair amount of work on moving Ads to HTTPS (moved mobile app ads to https)

The work actually started quite a while back, but the overall ads industry and internet as a whole moves really really slow. Add the mobile ecosystem to the equation, and there is a bunch of issues.

The whole work is a combination of a bunch of things (in no chronological order): 1. Google pushed search ranking changes. 2. Google moved all of ads to HTTPS, and this took some time to make it happen. 3. Apple created ATS to make people think about it. 4. Apple wanted to enforce ATS for non-web content, had to back out. 5. Let's encrypt made access to certs free. 6. Big vendors joined.

Unfortunately, the world is slow when it comes to changes like these, but i am quite happy with the outcome so far.

edit: added context.

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