That means anyone intercepting your traffic won’t be able to see what you’re doing on the site, which is especially important when you’re doing things like entering credit card numbers or personally identifiable information. What the “secure” padlock tells youĬhrome/Chromium( ), Firefox( ), Edge( ), and Safari( ) all have slightly different versions of the “safe” padlock, but they’re all telling you basically the same thing: this site has received an SSL certificate and is encrypting the data it sends you and the data you send back using HTTPS. Its basic function is pretty obvious: a normal padlock means the site is safe, while a warning symbol or message means it’s not safe, right? Actually, it’s a bit more complex than that, since the padlock only shows you whether your connection to the site is encrypted with HTTPS and doesn’t provide much insight at all into whether the site itself is legitimate and/or completely secure. Sometimes that little padlock in your browser’s address bar changes color, gets an extra symbol layered on top of it, or turns into text.
