The "fix" is "easy": If you want referrer data, offer your site over SSL or use the Google Webmaster tools (I don't know whether there is an API to get to that data).
Browsers don't send a referrer header if the referring site is SSL and the target site is not. This has always been the case even on the desktop.
"Clients SHOULD NOT include a Referer header field in a (non-secure) HTTP request if the referring page was transferred with a secure protocol."
EDIT: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=141641 Maybe I'm wrong but that seems to be what some browsers do/did.
The point of SSL is to protect from snooping, not as a general privacy-protection mechanism that should have everything privacy-related shoehorned into it.
Google deliberately prevents referrer data from passing regardless of the state of SSL. It only allows it to pass if someone's clicking on an ad.
It seems this step is not being taken on iOS, it could be google who singling out iOS6 and not doing the redirect to the HTTP page.
I haven't tested any browsers or looked at any standards on this, but if that works it doesn't make any sense to me. I would think that the rule would be "Browsers don't send a referrer header [to a different domain] if the referring site is SSL" period (no "and the target site is not" part). If a URL on site X contains secret information, why would it be OK to transmit that secret information to some other website simply because the secret information is encrypted while in transit? At the very least, I would expect the user to be prompted to confirm such action before doing it (which would probably be more annoying to the user than just dropping the referrer info).
This isn't a huge deal as you can still get details of Google Queries using Google Webmaster Tools: http://www.google.com/webmasters/
1) If it's a privacy thing, then Google is happy having a leak by giving these terms to advertisers
2) The data is not provided in a way that can be used by third party ad retargeting terms, giving Google a competitive advantage
3) Publishers can't use the data to better target with landing pages
4) Google Webmaster Central data only goes back for a short period of time, and if you haven't constantly been downloading your data, all your historic traffic information related to a term has gone poof.
The queries you can download from webmaster tools are just 1 column of data....nothing to tie queries to conversions or any meaningful metric.
If it was everyone who was losing this data...I could understand the change but if you buy adwords ads, you still get the referral data even in https Google.
Can be interpreted that not sending the referer, and thus the decision to use the SSL version is in anyway malicious in intent (almost like what the author is implying in the headline)?
So by doing the Google searches over HTTPS, you make the life of pages and analytics vendors harder, but you are doing a huge favor to the end users because now their searches are private between them and Google. Nobody else on the way can sniff them. No government and no neighbor/coworker.
Of course, once the user clicked and found your site, the URL the user initially used isn't that confidential any more, so in theory, passing the referrer wouldn't be a problem in this case, but that's not what the standard says and it's not what browsers are doing.
If you want to see this changed, talk to the IETF or the W3C to have the standard changed such that, for example, google could add some rel= attribute to tell the browser that sending a referrer is OK.
Or just serve your page over SSL, further helping the end-user - and it's all about them in the first place - isn't it?