News sites could protect your privacy with encryption. Here’s why they probably won’t.

He is absolutely right, but it goes beyond news sites. I’m involved in the running of a price comparison portal for insurance, finance and utilities. In order to use our site to compare offers, we do not collect any personally identifiable information, but of course we only serve our visitors via SSL/TLS. Anything but that would be ethically unacceptable to me. No one else needs to know that you decided you need car insurance for a new Ford Mustang or are thinking about buying life-insureance, especially not government.

So his call to news sites is laudable, but it really goes for any site at all. There is no reason a web-site in 2013 should serve anything unencrypted.