We often hear the complaint here that nobody cares / cared about Snowden's revelations. But to me it seems he did provide a lot of the impetus for having HTTPS virtually everywhere and a lot of the instant messenging apps being end-to-end encrypted. Most of WhatsApp's users are as non-technical as it gets, and yet they use the kind of encryption that only computer enthusiasts were interested in just a couple years ago. It's a great development (all the limitations and caveats notwithstanding) IMO.

Ironically, Telegram markets itself as the most private and secure messenger, but in reality, it's much less private than WhatsApp or Viber: any regular (non-secret) Telegram chats are not end-to-end encrypted - if they were, you wouldn't be able to access them from a new device after authorization with a password.

they are not end-to-end encrypted but they are encrypted. Also, I read that WhatsApp is going to switch to the same mode, for user convenience: https://bgr.com/2019/07/29/whatsapp-update-to-bring-multi-pl...

Oh, come on! If Telegram can decrypt chats for a user, they can decrypt it if they really want. Any other kind of encryption is irrelevant - from third party attackers, tls works good enough.

Yeh "endpoint security" is hard. You need some trusted specialized hardware or network.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_encryption#Endpoint...