Anything you post here is public anyway. Why would anyone go through the time and trouble of catching your pearls on the fly? The site is HTTPS in the only section that matters: where you enter your credit card and personal info.

If you're going to obsess about something, worry about scripts, web bugs, tracking cookies and flash, none of which are impacted by https. These gadgets "help" you by giving advertisers info about your browsing habits. Pelican is better than most BB's in that respect, they "only" seem to use a few google tools, but even this seemingly minor action allows the cookie farmers to track you. Since this info is for sale, it could "help" people with less beneficial tendencies. Although the data is nominally anonymized, it's not that hard to discover someone's identity from their cookie map.

The attached jpg illustrates just one day of my map, based on cookies and script associations. I've blanked out most of the sites, but you can find the Pelican BB represented by the Mercedes symbol in the circle at the bottom. Notice that it's connected to a large triangle, which happens to be Gstatic.com. This is a Google domain that's used to make websites load faster, probably related to serving adsense ads. Fast loading is an advantage, but notice how many sites end up networked via Gstatic. Simply because Pelican chooses to use google tools somewhere, my activity here is tied to a continuously growing map of my browsing habits. This can become known to third parties without my specific consent (somewhere, I granted blanket permission by accepting the "terms of service"). It's for sale from your favorite cookie farm. Note that I NEVER actually log on to Google and don't even use them for search. They know all this simply because the sites I visit may choose to participate or use some seemingly unrelated shareware that ties into the network. This map has only run for a couple of hours, and it's already hard to fit on one page.

Notice that some websites are off to the sides, standalone nodes. Either I've been successful at blocking whatever scripts they contain, or their owners are generous and smart enough not to get involved in cookie sharing. By contrast, among the very worst sites for tracking tools are online newspapers and magazines, so if you are concerned, buy a real paper.

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