Your privacy is important. Unknowingly, some of you may be entering data into web forms that are unprotected. Most of the data being entered may be harmless, e.g. a food preference in an online menu. Even if you are not entering data and just visiting a web page that isn’t using https then you may be exposing your privacy.
The biggest offense I see most often when I browse the web are login forms that are using plain http. That exposes your password to anyone who might be eavesdropping on your connection.
This is why we decided to make all pages on PeerJ use ‘https’ to make things a bit more secure. HTTPS is what online payment forms and your online bank use. It means malicious eavesdroppers will be unable to view sensitive data or pages that you are reading and take advantage of that.
Using https on all pages does have some tradeoffs for visitors though. Namely, it means the page takes a bit longer to load. Currently that is an extra 150-200 milliseconds to load the page (200ms is less than the time of an eye blink). We’ll be beefing up our systems once we get publishing to reduce that added latency, however. We might make exceptions on some pages if we see a need, but those pages would never be ones where you enter data.
Jason