Tracking prevented during HTTP traffic, but not during HTTPS: Please explain.

No-body

Hello,

 

In your article “F-secure Freedome anti-tracking feature explained” written in your community is stated that Freedome does not block any tracking from HTTPS traffic.

 

When using Google’s search engine “Google” these searches are nowadays always encrypted and “https” is always written in the address field, regardless if you are logged on to any Google account or not. BUT this does not seem to be the case for Microsoft’s corresponding search engine “Bing”. It seems to be possible to search with Bing without encryption (only http and not https). Question: Does this mean that no Freedome anti-tracking is engaged when searching with “Google” but it is engaged and fully working if using Bing as search engine (if only http)? And, as a consequence of this: Is all searches with Google traceable by company Google since it involves https = In this case Freedome is to no use for me to prevent Google for logging/tracking my searches/search results?

 

 

Tapsa

Hi,

 

As long as the protocol used is unencrypted HTTP, we are able to work with that and do the anti-tracking. However, as you stated, with HTTPS we cannot inspect the traffic itself. To do that we would need to be able to break the HTTPS encryption on the fly. 

 

Yours,

Tapio