Yes well, regardless of what any SEO blogs may say, the fact is that browsers do send referer headers when travelling from one SSL page to another.

So unless gAnalytics is going to be deliberately ignoring incoming referer headers in particular circumstances from now on, things should remain the same if your page uses SSL.

I willing to believe however that they actually are going to be deliberately ignoring/discarding the data even when it's available. That would certainly make the EU happy.

Your use of "them" is a bit unclear.

The browser decides when to send a referrer, not Google. You can, for instance, tell your browser never to send them, or to send a specific one.