Re:Ars tests Internet surveillance by spying on an NPR reporter
by daeken on Thursday June 12, 2014 @12:16PM
(#7884268)
The cost is quite low for a single connection, but given that Google Analytics is on a huge portion of sites, that adds up really, really quickly. In addition, the additional roundtrips required for the TLS handshake is killer on a high-latency connection, seriously slowing things down for mobile devices.
Given that there really is no privacy benefit, I can't imagine why you would take on that overhead; Google clearly agrees, or they would've turned on HTTPS by default.
Of course, you may still be right in that it adds no privacy, but I wouldn't call it an "incredible waste" (particularly not of bandwidth), since the cost is really quite low.