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the encryption keys, why can't the government just sneak on them?
(lemmy.dbzer0.com)
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this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2024
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Privacy
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Bh sharing, unencrypted, on Lemmy that you like watching revolutionary videos on YouTube, the government now has that data, even if Google wasn't going to give it to them. I thought I would just add that, as everyone else has explained asymmetric encryption well.
Also, usually it's just the content of the website, not the URL itself that is encrypted, so anyone, not just the government, can know what YouTube videos you watch (as the video ID is in the URL) as well as the URL of any other websites you visit.
That's not true. The original DNS request, for youtube.com, may not have been encrypted, but any URL parameters afterwards are kept encrypted. As long as HTTPS is used, if hypothetically Google wasn't going to give it to them, "the government," or your ISP for that matter, can tell you're watching YouTube, but can't tell which video you're watching.
URLs are definitely encrypted. What can be sent unencrypted are domain names and IP addresses. Which is not a problem when the host name is 'youtube.com', but is a bigger problem if it is 'the-terrorists.com'.
The other 2 commenters are wrong. URLs as they appear in your web browser are NOT encrypted when sent over https protocols.
The only data that is encrypted is POST data, and ONLY if it is sent over HTTPS.
So for example, a website login page crafts a URL like https://some.example.com/login?sessionID=12345678 and when you log in to the site extra parameters like Username and Password are sent via POST data, then anyone listening to your web traffic (like the NSA or your neighbor with wireshark) will br able to see the website and the sessionID, but not the login details as they will only show up encrypted.
However, if the site is ran by idiots who pass the data in the URL like this https://some.example.com/login?sessionID=12345678&username=Homer&password=Simpson, then ANYONE listeneing would have your credentials.