Lots of sites these days, that don't deal with sensitive data, enable encryption. I think it's mostly to make (paranoid?) users feel safer. In cases where there is a user's account being logged in, their personal data accessed, I see how it can be useful.

But what if I'm just reading a news site? Everyone has access to that, it's all over newspapers even. What's the point of encrypting such easily accessible information?

Many users have public social network profiles with their interests listed in them, political and religious beliefs, or that information can be easily found from their personal blogs and websites. They don't see that as a threat to their personal life, so they choose not to hide it. How can viewing non-encrypted popular public content harm them? And how does encrypting such pages protect their privacy?

The issue you're dealing with, here, is that if you decide not to encrypt a connection, you're making assumptions regarding the sensitivity of the data that goes over that connection.

Unfortunately, it is impossible to properly make that assumption because:


You might not have fully understood all the implication of the data (for instance, if Twitter didn't encrypt data, it could be used by government agencies to spot dissidents and opponents).
Data can become sensitive after they are being transmitted (for instance, answering "who was your first grade teacher" in a web chat with old school buddies could lead to a compromise of your iTunes account later on).


In the end, it is the same as dealing with sensitive paper documents: you can decide to shred what's sensitive only but all it takes for that model to crumble is a single mistake. It's much easier to simply destroy ALL documents securely and not worry about sorting.

Given the relatively low cost and of using connection security and the fact that it wards you against all the above problems (mostly), it makes a lot more sense to encrypt everything that to try to cherry-pick the "right" content to be encrypted.
