I agree with the overall point of the responses that Google isn't in fact evil to be doing this, but I want to disagree somewhat with one point - the idea that Google doesn't have any obligation to respect users wishes just because its a free service that no one is forcing you to use.<p>The problem with this is that Google's very existence makes it harder for similar services to exist. There are a few reasons for this, including:<p>1. Google benefits from economies of scale<p>2. Google benefits from having massive amounts of data to crunch through (for example, its hard to build a span filter as good as Gmail's without a training dataset as big as Gmail's)<p>Its kind of like the argument for the minimum wage - conservatives would say its not needed because you can just choose not to work for a company that isn't offering enough money, but sometimes you don't really have an alternative.
A comment on the answer perfectly encapsulates this post:<p><i>Did you just troll security.SE and then reasonably answer your own question?</i> – Stephen Touset
Best snarky answer from that thread: "Is Google overreaching by forcing you to log in with a password?"<p>Vaccine analogy answer from stackexchange: It's not just about you, it's about herd immunity. Having everyone have secure communications helps makes others secure as well.
Can anyone explain this line from commenter Darren Cook: "Once this enforcement is in place, browsers will simply refuse to connect to Google over an insecure or compromised connection. By shipping this setting in the browser itself, circumvention will become effectively impossible."<p>Some browsers are open source, and it seems to me that developers can never definitely rely on their behavior. Surely the enforcement depends ultimately not on the browsers but rather on the server refusing non-TLS connection attempts?
Google and others[Telecoms] are in positions to collect rents on your PI from third parties and G.O.'s. When they[Google] recently learned that the NSA had tapped their unencrypted fiber lines between data centers, they were pissed.<p>Not because they give a fraction of a shit about you, but because the NSA was stealing their product.<p>Now they encrypt everything with [very strong] SSL to force everyone to ask/pay for their info.