In just four short years, a healthy dose of paranoia about individual privacy as well as emerging support for encryption by browsers, social media sites, webmail, and SaaS applications have pushed encryption estimates from almost non-existent (in the low single digits before 2013) to just over 50% by the end of 2016.

That’s quite a victory for data privacy, but just how much of a victory?

F5 Labs explores that question in the first of our annual TLS Telemetry reports. Our goal is not just to report raw data, but to make that data actionable by describing the who, what, when, how, and why of cryptography, and provide guidance on what’s next for your organization. This being our initial report, we’ve taken care to explain our motivations—crazy though they may seem—for scanning the entire TLS Internet, describe our research methodology, and recap the recent history of and summarize the current cryptographic landscape.