Re: Opera's three security levels

Mary Ellen Zurko <Mary_Ellen_Zurko@notesdev.ibm.com>, 2006-11-20 11:50 -0500:

> One thing that jumps out at me is that it's not clear what the user should 
> and shouldn't do in situations where those various levels occur. Do you 
> have any actionable advice to the user associated with these levels?

If you click on the padlock, a "Security information" dialog box
appears. That dialog box contains some natural-language
description of why the security level is set to the number it's
set to. It also contains details about the type and strength of
the encryption protocol. (Info about the type and strength of the
encryption protocol also appears as popup "tooltip" text if you
mouse over the padlock.)

Basically what we're trying to do with that numbered level
indicator is to give some finer-grained indication of the security
of a particular site relative to other sites: To convey that a
site showing security level of 1 or 2 is not quite what it could
be in terms of security (if it was, it would get a 3). That
doesn't make it absolutely insecure -- it just means it could be
more secure if the content provider chose to make it so.

So to answer your question, No, we don't have explicit actionable
advice associated with each of the levels. I don't see how we
could, practically, associate specific guidance with each of them.
The expectation is basically that you'll use the numbered security
level as another data point (along with other security context
information) in making a decision about the degree of confidence
you want to have sharing personal information with the site.

  --Mike

Received on Friday, 24 November 2006 05:16:51 UTC