China broke into google and surveilled targets. Like, actually spied on dissidents through their gmail. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Aurora This greatly sped up projects to protect user data from external threats.

Heather Adkins who leads security (and is one of those ultra-longtimers) brought a number of senior eng for internal, ultra-private meetings where they showed the eng leadership exactly what had happened. I wasn't invited but at that time, sat near the exit door and their faces were just ... aghast at the consequences of what had just happened as a function of the systems they built.

The snowden dumps also showed that the NSA had packet traces of BigTable RPCs which was quite an eye-opener and definitely sped up privacy projects.