For several years now, Google has been exerting pressure to increase the usage of HTTPS across the internet. By defaulting to secure connections on both ends, users can be protected from anyone who may intercept or even manipulate data as it flows back and forth -- quite useful in a world where you can't even trust WiFi . For its own products, Google says HTTPS use is up to 89 percent overall, up from just 50 percent at the beginning of 2014. The number of top 100 websites defaulting to HTTPS has nearly doubled since last year (way to catch up ), growing from 37 to 71. Now that Google is flagging websites that request data without securing the connection first, developers have even more reason to make the switch. In its Chrome browser, Google says 73 percent of pages in the US are now delivered with encryption. One thing holding back the numbers are older mobile devices that don't support encryption due to their hard...