It seems that every week, "yet another" end-to-end encrypted app is unleashed on the world. I've been looking for an reason to use D3, so I combined data from the EFF's Secure Messaging Scorecard with some very rough user numbers I was able to find (radius corresponds to user base):

EFF Security Scores (2015) Filters

Look at all those apps in the top right. True, most of them have relatively small user bases compared to the heavy-hitters in the bottom half of the graph, but iMessage and Facetime are end-to-end, and have giant user bases. If Tim Cook thinks users care about privacy, and Apple is differentiating itself on this axis, then it's probably "a thing."

In this post, I'm going to be looking at why the slew of "yet another" end-to-end apps might fuel a shift in incentives for some cloud services, away from the prevalent "data-as-value" model, towards a "data-as-liability" model.

This is because end-to-end encryption is turning out to be a good solution for mitigating some of the concerns about the cloud's security model. If these incentives end up aligning in a way that benefits privacy, and there’s no guarantee that they will, this would mean great things for us as the end-users.