Google reveals 77% encryption of its online traffic

Google has revealed how much of the traffic to its search engine and other services was being protected from hackers as part of its push to encrypt all online activity.

Encryption shielded 77 per cent of the requests sent from around the world to Google's data centres, up from 52 per cent at the end of 2013, statistics released by the company revealed yesterday.

The numbers extended across all Google services except its YouTube video site, which counted over a billion users. Google planned to add YouTube to its encryption breakdown by the end of this year.

Encryption, a security measure scrambles transmitted information so it was unintelligible if it was intercepted by a third party.

Google started emphasising the need to encrypt  people's online activities after confidential documents leaked in 2013 by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed that the US government had been sucking up personal data transferred over the internet. The surveillance programmes leveraged massive holes in unencrypted websites.

Even as it enhanced encryption on its services, Google had been looking to use the clout of its influential search engine to prod other websites to strengthen their security.

Meanwhile, HTTPS which is a protocol for secure communication over a computer network had been widely considered as one of the keys to a safer internet, but only with its broad implementation.

"Our aim with this project is to hold ourselves accountable and encourage others to encrypt so we can make the web even safer for everyone," wrote HTTPS evangelists Rutledge Chin Feman and Tim Willis on the Google Security Blog.

"We've long offered Gmail, Drive and Search over HTTPS, and in the last year, we've begun to add traffic from more products, like ads and Blogger as well," Feman and Willis explained. "We're making positive strides, but we still have a ways to go."

The Electronic Frontier Foundation had long pushed for HTTPS, however there were obstacles on the way to HTTPS implementation, including  older hardware and software. There was also resistance from some governments and organisations, Google said.