Microsoft Plans to Automatically Encrypt Bing Searches
How much can someone find out about you simply by seeing everything you've searched for on the Internet in the last month? Our search queries contain a lot of implicit personal information so if they get intercepted, they could pose a great threat to our privacy and this is why both Google and Yahoo automatically encrypt your searches. Microsoft has recently decided that protecting all its users' personal data is important, so the IT giant announced that Bing, its search engine, will start encrypting searches by default.
The possibility to encrypt all the traffic coming from Bing has already been available since early 2014, but it was an option that the users had to choose by themselves. Starting this summer, the encryption becomes compulsory, so those who are unaware of the dangers that the Internet poses, will be protected by default. This upcoming change means that whenever you access the Bing website you will be automatically redirected to the https:// prefix instead of the classical http:// one.
What does this change actually mean for the regular user? It's simple: after Microsoft's plan comes to fruition, anyone who intercepts your Bing-related web traffic will receive scrambled data which he or she will need to decrypt in order to read, and that's not very easy. However, like all other major search engines, Bing depends on advertising for revenue, so webmasters and advertisers will still be able to gather the certain information that they require
