While most of the time our searches tend to be rather innocuous in nature, sometimes you just don’t want people to know what you’re searching for, and if features like incognito mode weren’t enough, Microsoft might have the solution for you. The Redmond company has recently announced that they will now begin to encrypt search traffic by default.For starters, Microsoft will be supporting the use of TLS protocols and will begin encrypting search traffic by default. Prior to this, search traffic encryption was an option that users had to enable. What this means is that in the future, users can expect to see more traffic coming from “https” versus “http”.
According to the company, “With the move to encrypted search by default we will continue to pass along a referrer string so that marketers and webmasters will be able to identify traffic as coming from Bing. However, to further protect our users’ privacy, we will not include the used query terms. We will still provide some limited query term data available without compromising the security of customer data through our various webmaster and advertiser tools.”
So if you’ve typically relied on other platforms such as Yahoo, Google, or DuckDuckGo and wanted more security and privacy, perhaps you could consider making a move to Bing in the future if these are features that you wouldn’t mind getting your hands on.
Filed in . Read more about Bing (Microsoft), Microsoft, Privacy and Security.