EFF and DuckDuckGo's new partnership is about enhancing secure browsing and protecting user information on the web
Although most web browsers now automatically switch you to the secure HTTPS (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure) version of a website if you try to go to a non-secure HTTP address, the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) offers another option.
Its HTTPS Everywhere add-on has been protecting users for over a decade now, and automatically sends your browser to the secure version of a site if it exists. Thanks to a new partnership with privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo, the tool is about to get even better at redirecting users.
To enhance secure browsing and protect user information on the web, the EFF has announced it will now incorporate rulesets from DuckDuckGo Smarter Encryption which covers significantly more domains than EFF's current model.
"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," explains 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."
As a result, the EFF will stop taking new requests for domains to be added to its HTTPS Everywhere extension at the end of May.
Gabriel Weinberg, DuckDuckGo founder and CEO welcomed the new partnership, saying:
EFFs pioneering work with the HTTPS Everywhere extension took privacy protection in a new and needed direction, seamlessly upgrading people to secure website connections. We're delighted that EFF has now entrusted DuckDuckGo to power HTTPS Everywhere going forward, using our next generation Smarter Encryption dataset.
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