They’re responsible for helping billions of people gauge the security of the sites they visit, but there’s only an inscrutable icon to signal the difference between an encrypted site that locks its connections and unprotected sites that leave them vulnerable to threats—which can range anywhere from a hacker sniffing passwords at the next Starbucks table to a hacked home router eavesdropping on emails to an internet provider surreptitiously injecting ads.
The confusing collection of hieroglyphics used by most browsers today to draw that line are misleading at best; at worst they’re negligently silent or even dishonest about a site’s lack of security.
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