The most popular porn site on the internet now supports HTTPS, which means your adult content viewing will be safe from prying eyes.
Pornhub announced yesterday it made the switch to the more secure communication protocol, and said its sister site YouPorn will follow suit on April 4. This means both destinations will come complete with site-wide encryption to give users some peace of mind about their dirty web habits. The news comes just days after Congress voted to reverse an FCC privacy rule, that will now grant internet providers access to customer web data.
“With this internet communication protocol we can ensure not only the security of our platform, but also that of our users,” said Corey Price, vice president of Pornhub, according to the Daily Mail. “At the end of the day, we want every single one of them to feel safe and secure on our platform while enjoying our library of over five million videos.”
HTTPS is a more secure version of the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP), the foundational protocol for the internet. HTTP is a set of rules that determines how files (video, photos, text, etc.) get formatted and transmitted, and how browsers should respond to various commands. HTTPS (the “S” simply stands for “secure”) adds encryption so files cannot be intercepted.
If you’re curious about which sites use HTTPS, just take a glance at the front of any website URL. Here, you will either see “HTTPS” or “HTTP.” HTTPS isn’t a perfect solution. Internet providers will still be able to see that you loaded up Pornhub, but they won’t know which specific sections or videos you were watching.
The changes were made in response to a Google Transparency Report that shows which of the most popular websites on the internet are encrypted. Pornhub is one of the top 100, and previously a part of the minority that doesn’t offer this added layer of privacy. Other popular sites without HTTPS support include IMDB, MSN, and eBay.