If you are a fan of YouTube but are usually cautious about the secure levels of your connection, this news with please you. In a new announcement, the company has announced that 97 percent of the traffic now comes over encrypted connections.
Google initially started to the transition to HTTPS for YouTube in 2014. In November 2014, it announced that the figure stood at 77 percent, from which we’ve come a long way. The remaining 3 percent will be phased out with time and are mainly there due of lack of hardware support for full modern HTTPS encryption.
YouTube’s data was only added to Google’s Transparency Report section earlier this year, in addition to services like Drive, Gmail, Maps and News. Google is also adding Calendar to the mix, which currently shows 93 percent of its data with HTTPS encryption.
Google claims that by securing connections and maintaining content integrity, it helped improve the experience by eliminating streaming errors. Also it had to ensure that the transition didn’t break things, given the scale of platforms on which YouTube is available:
You can watch YouTube videos on everything from flip phones to smart TVs. We A/B tested HTTPS on every device to ensure that users would not be negatively impacted.
YouTube also employs HTTP Secure Transport Security to cut down on redirects from HTTP to HTTPS to improve both security and latency.
“In the real world,” the report says, “we know that any non-secure HTTP traffic could be vulnerable to attackers. All websites and apps should be protected with HTTPS.
u should also talk about throttling youtube by local isp.