ImperialViolet

In yesterday's post I threw in the following that I've been asked to clarify:

“we know that those bypass buttons are clicked 60% of the time by Chrome users”

Chrome collects anonymous statistics from users who opt in to such collection (and thank you to those who do!). One of those statistics covers how frequently people bypass SSL interstitials. (As always, the Chrome privacy policy has the details.)

We define bypassing the interstitial as clicking the ‘Proceed anyway’ button and not bypassing as either closing the tab, navigating elsewhere, or clicking the ‘Back’ button.

I picked five days at random over the past six weeks and averaged the percentages of the time that users bypassed rather than not. That came to 61.6%.

There may be some biases here: we may have a biased population because we only include users who have opted in to statistics collection. We are also counting all interstitals: there may be a small number of users who bypass a lot of SSL errors. But that's the data that we have.