Google upsets Government Snooping with new encryption HTTPS in Gmail

Google has taken another step in its position against the surveillance by the NSA Thursday, promising to use an encrypted HTTPS connection whenever a Gmail user checks or sends an email.

Gmail is HTTPS encryption by default in 2010, but this announcement means that no one will be able to 'hear' messages by moving users to the Gmail servers.

Last year, reports surface that unencrypted data packets passing through fiber between private data centers links could be intercepted by spies of Government without the operators of data center knowledge, which allows the Government to access millions of records per day of internal networks from Yahoo and Google. To remedy this, Gmail now encrypts messages moving in-house as well as they move between the data from Google own centres.

For the cloud, including email services, security is a major concern of the user. Service providers are in a unique position to provide assurance customers, and a new Microsoft study shows that users are willing to pay for it. According to Microsoft, 60 percent of customers would pay their host a 26% premium on average for security assurances

Last year, Gmail was available at 99.97% of the time, or averaged less than 2 hours of downtime for a user throughout the year. Earlier this week, Google Talk and Google + went down for about 3 hours.

Two-factor authentication becomes a privileged means to provide the online services like e-mail, even if it is not perfect. Recently, a new Web site launched to help users to determine in a glance what online services use two-factor authentication.

Nicole Henderson (12 posts)

Nicole Henderson is the editor-in-Chief of the Web Host Industry Review where she covers news every day and offers online, as well as in print. She holds a Bachelor's degree in journalism from Ryerson University in Toronto. You can find it on Twitter @NicoleHenderson.

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