The EFF has announced the end of life for their HTTPS Everywhere program. This might seems like a bad thing but it isn’t. The EFF says that their browser extension is no longer needed because all the major browsers now offer the same thing natively.
The original idea was to keep the Nosy Parkers and nannies out of our business by automatically defaulting to HTTPS when possible. There’s no longer any need for that because the browsers are doing it on their own.
Some browsers need to be configured to implement it, others, like Safari, just do it out of the box. Regardless, there’s no longer a need for the HTTPS Everywhere extensions.
When it comes to protecting ourselves from those who would snoop on our activities, victories are thin on the ground so it’s nice to have this one. Doubtless the NSA can break into our HTTPS sessions if they really want to but they were never the problem for most of us. Rather, it’s the ISPs and others who are vacuuming up our information so they can sell it to data brokers. Using HTTPS makes it harder to do that. Their reaction to DNS over HTTPS shows how much of this snooping is going on and why it’s worth our while to resist it.
Thanks to EFF for their great work and encouraging the browser manufacturers to bake this capability in. I’m in favor of anything that makes the snoopers’ lives more difficult.