Would Whatsapp and Facebook Chat been end-to-end encrypted had it not been for the Snowden leaks? It's hard to say. But personally I believe it wouldn't have happened if the public perception of security had not been altered by his leaks.

Another example that affects billions: after the Snowden leaks, Google scrambled to encrypt their intra-datacenter traffic. Before they did so, those billions of end-users would get the green padlock when visiting Gmail, only to have their data snooped as it travelled over Google-owned dark fiber.

You are right that UX still dominates all other factors. But I think post-Snowden, there have been many significant improvements to security that affect billions of people.

If you dig into security world details, you'll see that Whatsapp's is not even considered as a competitor. They could just claim they're now encrypted without actually doing anything to get the same total effect.

Today's encryption and security are not features, these are marketing tags like these "without chlorine" on salt packs. Thanks to guess who?

> but the effect was minimal beyond crypto heads and maybe enterprise users.

Security/privacy on the Internet is known for being hard, and it used to be, if you wanted privacy you had to withdraw slightly from society, and learn Linux, read about TOR, learn how to harden your web browser, or otherwise attempt to 'go dark' from the prying eyes of governments or sophisticated criminals.

Now it can be said with certainty that many of the things we take for granted, have come along leaps and bounds due to Snowden, and are a lot less complicated to Install and setup.

Now a privacy-conscious teenager can install TOR browser bundle, Signal, uBlock, or any number of things you can find on sites like PrivacyTools[1] with relatively little trouble compared to the Internet pre-Snowden.

> UX continues to dominate all other market factors in computing by a huge margin

It might come at some cost, like reduced UX, as you mention, but that's called a security tradeoff or a privacy tradeoff and it's a well-known hard fact of protecting your communications and traffic.

[1] https://www.privacytools.io/

I think the impact here has been less with individual users getting better about security and more that companies and developers have been spurred to try and do something about it. For example let's encrypt might not exist and that's led to a huge amount of traffic moving to https. Or the rise of more easy to use encrypted messaging apps like ete encryption in WhatsApp.

Yet the article you just commented on lists some concrete ways it affected everyone; like increased TLS usage, FDE and e2e encryption being standard with consumer products and general increase in public awareness around online privacy.

> UX continues to dominate all other market factors

There is an inherent tension between security and UX from the perspective of designing an individual tool. But from the perspective of building good security habits and policies, good UX is essential. The only way to achieve both is to invest the resources into thoughtful system design. What drives people to invest such resources?

The real question is how much of it was because of him. They assume it was him that made these changes but that's ignoring the data leak of over 100,000,000 government employees personal information, plus the University of Maryland hacks, and probably 2 dozen other high profile hacks since then. To credit the changes to him, you would have to shove that those events (individually or collectively) had no effect on privacy concerns. I would venture to guess it was the multitude of hacks that led to increased privacy concerns, since 90% of what he revealed wouldn't be defeated by using current encryption methods or changing your password... I mean what is the count on the FBI "breaking" TOR? 3x in the past year that went public?

Yes, Google added encryption but only because they were afraid of losing a competitive edge. They will still gladly sell all the information they collect (by monitoring emails, texts, phone calls, etc - which their right to monitor was defended in a district court) provided you have enough money. They are first and foremost an advertising agency. All their other services and products just serve to give them more sources of information.