The Snowden revelations did help drive the push towards having HTTPS everywhere, particularly the findings about snooping on internal Google traffic, which seemingly made Google obsessive about HTTPS afterwards. But I don’t think they are directly related.
replyThe Snowden revelations revealed just how vast the intercept of internet communications could be. There was already talk of needing HTTPS everywhere. Snowden's release got more support behind it, and brought the timeline forward.
reply> There was already talk of needing HTTPS everywhere. Snowden's release got more support behind it, and brought the timeline forward.
replyGoogle made HTTPS default-on in 2010, but there was a toggle so that you could disable the forced use:
* https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2010/01/default-http...
In 2014 the toggle was removed and all connections were forced to HTTPS.
The Snowden revelations occurred in 2013:
The 2010 change was only for gmail. Search was 2011 [1] and other changes were post-2013. I was there at the time, and there was a huge internal reprioritization in response to the Snowden news, especially for internal traffic.
replyRelated: https://www.jefftk.com/p/history-of-https-usage
[1] https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/10/making-search-more-s...