I sent the following to Google’s Suggestions Box:
Google should provide access to their website thru HTTPS, the encrypted version of HTTP. This will allow people to search for things on Google without other people on their network or at their ISP being able to see what they search for. Because so many people search for so many things on Google, it’s important that it lives up to the highest privacy standards. Supporting HTTPS would be a large step in the right direction.
Doing it would only take a little work on your part (you could just set up a proxy that decrypted connections and passed them on; software and hardware to do this is very readily available), but would do great things to protect the privacy of your users. I hope you’ll consider it. Please let me know if you have any questions.
Posted by Aaron Swartz on February 18, 2003 09:41 AM