To use or not to use SSL? Why use SSL always?

Question

The argument for using SSL is to prevent some malicious user who has gone through the pains of snooping your traffic being able to read your traffic. So while it may make se

Answer 1

One of the things most people here are forgetting to address is what do you consider sensitive data? What one person considers boring useless data may be considered highly confidential by someone else, or vice versa. So what are you going to do? Use SSL on all the data to play it safe so that you don't get sued? Get real. Take a chat program for example. Most would agree that encrypting the username and password would be important, but what about the chat text itself? Most chat is mundane stuff and eliminating SSL will provide better performance. Personally, I would let the end user decide what is important and then provide SSL for only those types of information that they feel needs to be encrypted. That's what Google does with Gmail. You have the choice of using SSL or not.