Google has revealed that it has taken steps to encrypt every single email you send through Gmail.
In a recent blog post, Gmail Security Engineering Lead Nicolas Lidzborski outlined Google’s how the company had tightened up its popular email service.
"Starting today, Gmail will always use an encrypted HTTPS connection when you check or send email," he wrote. This means that "no one can listen in on your messages as they go back and forth between you and Gmail’s servers—no matter if you're using public WiFi or logging in from your computer, phone or tablet."
Of course, Google has always supported the HTTPS secure communications protocol, and in 2010 made it the default option. But now the company has taken that option entirely out of our hands, ensuring that Gmail is a completely encrypted experience for everyone.
The post also points out that your emails are secure even when they're moving about internally between Google’s data centres. It mentions that these increased privacy steps have come in the wake of "last summer’s revelations."
This is evidently a reference to the court case that arose when it was found that Gmail was scanning its users emails as part of a targeted ad system.
Not that Google’s ongoing security tweaks have affected Gmail’s reliability that much. According to the post, "Gmail was available 99.978 percent of the time" in 2013, which amounts to less than two hours disruption per user for the whole year.
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