My theory on the subject (which may be completely wrong, since I can't find an answer on the internet anywhere yet), is that Opera uses the same compression servers for "Opera Mini/Turbo" (now referred to as Data Savings in Opera for Android) to do the compressing for Opera Max. Traditionally, Opera Mini, and Opera Turbo always bypassed the compression servers on a https connection anyway, which means (if I'm correct) that anything sent using a secure connection is untouched.
What I don't have answers for is whether or not other secure connections are touched by Opera Max (ie: encrypted SMTP, encrypted IMAP) and what server is actually used. I would wager a no for the other secure connections, simply based on the fact that the data would be gibberish to Opera's servers, so the only way to compress it would be to decrypt it (only works if Opera's servers are the end destination) or to run something like a zip or rar algorithm on the data, which doesn't make sense to me, cause if you lose something, the whole connection would get screwed over, and you would have to start from scratch. Besides, I'm pretty sure that the FAQ says that Opera Max doesn't touch anything secured anyway. For the other question, well, I started my hunch, but it would be nice to know whether or not the Data Savings feature of Opera for Android is now effectively useless...