Is Big Brother listening?

August 28, 2008 6:57 PM

Can FaceTime IM monitoring read the traffic on googletalk when it's being run via the browser?

My employer is using FaceTime IM Monitoring and I'm curious whether it can monitor GoogleTalk when it's being run in the browser with SSL encryption running.

posted by Jase to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

My guess would be no, but I certainly don't know for sure. Presumably in the browser it's using an an SSL AJAX request. And I assume FaceTime is just looking for connections on whatever port regular IM clients use.
posted by meta_eli at 8:48 PM on August 28, 2008

Almost certainly not via SSL, but gmail (at least, as of this moment) does not force SSL (although it should) and people don't often switch to the https, so probably 90% of GTalk conversations are in plaintext.
posted by tmcw at 9:59 PM on August 28, 2008

Gmail does allow you to force SSL. It was recently (July 24th) added as an option under the Settings--> General tab.
posted by sharkfu at 10:40 PM on August 28, 2008 [1 favorite]

(sweet, thanks)
posted by tmcw at 4:53 AM on August 29, 2008

Response by poster: Thanks all! I was thinking they wouldn't be able to monitor the data, but my understanding of the truly technical bits is somewhat limited.
posted by Jase at 7:37 AM on August 29, 2008