Happy Safer Internet Day! Wait, you had no idea it was Safer Internet Day? And you say you don’t even know what Safer Internet Day is? As noted on the Safer Internet Day website, it’s a day each year in February that Insafe organizes to “promote safer and more responsible use of online technology and mobile phones, especially among children and young people across the world.” Online security is a hugely important topic, needless to say, so BGR fully endorses this great annual event. Guess who else endorses it: Google.
The world’s top Internet company is celebrating this event in a few different ways, the most widely publicized of which has been a simple offer that will get you an extra 2GB of Google Drive cloud storage for free if you perform a quick security check. But Google has also just announced two new Gmail features that are aimed at keeping you and your private data safe.
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Gmail is one of the most secure options out there as far as widely available free email services go. It supports encryption, authentication, suspicious activity detection and more in an effort to ensure that your private messages remain private. But as Google noted on Tuesday in a post on the Gmail blog, it takes two to tango — all of these secure features go out the window if the person you’re communicating with isn’t also using a secure system.
Beginning today, users will notice something new when they compose emails on the Gmail website. When you try to send an email to a person whose email service provider does not use TLS encryption, you’ll see a broken lock in the address bar. Clicking that lock will explain the risk, as seen in the following GIF:
On top of that, you’ll now see a question mark over the sender’s profile photo in the event that you receive a message that cannot be authenticated.
You can learn more about both of these new security measures in Google’s blog post.
