In my experience they caused people to get slightly more serious about security, but the effect was minimal beyond crypto heads and maybe enterprise users.
UX continues to dominate all other market factors in computing by a huge margin.
UX continues to dominate all other market factors in computing by a huge margin.
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.
Today's encryption and security are not features, these are marketing tags like these "without chlorine" on salt packs. Thanks to guess who?
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.
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?
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.