@nateklaiber, ideally I would just pass in a hash of acceptable values for the net_http, but the DSL that you guys have chosen kind of limits the flexibility of that. If the one could just pass in a hash of values for net_http options that would be great, but my fear was that users would attempt to use SSL by simply doing "https://" in the url or passing in port 443, and this seemed like the path of least resistance in light of the current DSL. 

Passing in a hash of values for net_http would need to override whatever other parameters are passed in presumably. One could remove the line for verify_mode, but then they would have to have certificates setup properly even for their integration and staging environments. 

I figured since most of the data being sent to a third party is probably not 'high risk' just having it encrypted would suffice. The threat of a MITM attack being used to muddle my analytics data is a risk I'm willing to live with. The threat of some geek sitting in a coffee shop picking off packets is not.