zlacker

The first two links are about Gmail and personalized results in web search specifically. Even as late as 2011 SSL being activated for a product was treated as unusual enough to write blog posts about, and it was up to individual projects whether or not to activate it and how to trade off the latency costs.

You're right that I might be mis-remembering the ordering of things, but I'm pretty sure by the time Snowden came around the vast majority of traffic was still unencrypted. Bearing in mind that lot of Google's traffic was stuff you wouldn't necessarily think of, like YouTube Thumbnails, map tiles and Omaha pings (for software update). Web search and Gmail by that point made up a relatively small amount of it, albeit valuable. Look at how the Chrome updater does update checks and you'll discover it uses some weird custom protocol which exists purely because at the time it was designed Google was in a massive LB CPU capacity crunch caused by turning on SSL for as many services as possible. Omaha controlled the client so had the flexibility to do cryptographic offload and was pushed to do so, to free up capacity for other services.

> What changed after Snowden was how Google encrypts traffic on its network, according to an article quoting you at the time.[5]

That also changed and did so at enormous speed, but I'm pretty sure by June 2013 most external traffic still didn't have TLS applied. It looks like Facebook started going all-SSL just 8 months before Snowden.

>>mike_h+(OP)
I had completely forgotten about YouTube. I think it switched to https video serving post-Snowden, but I can't find the announcement.

Edit: Here it is. Only 25% of YouTube's traffic was encrypted at the start of 2014. https://web.archive.org/web/20160802000052/https://youtube-e...