Google has announced today that it has made a few changes to Gmail to make it snoop-proof. In #-Link-Snipped-# Google has not directly pointed fingers at the National Security Agency but has stated that after last summer’s revelations (Edward Snowden disclosing classified documents regarding global surveillance by NSA) Google has made privacy of their users a top priority. For starters, Gmail will now always use an encrypted HTTPS connection. Gmail from the beginning has supported HTTPS and it was made default for all users in 2010. With this change irrespective of your device (computer, smartphone or tablet) and network (private or public) all the data traversing between the user and Gmail servers will not be susceptible to eavesdropping.


The next step taken by Google is to encrypt every single message that is being sent or received by you. The encryption makes sure that the messages are safe when they move between you and the Gmail servers and between Google’s massive data centers. This move makes sure that a PRISM like surveillance program cannot be carried out by government authorities. Finally in the blog post Google has boasted about the robustness of Gmail by stating that in the past year their service was functional for 99.978 percent of the time. This meant that on average each user experience less than two hours of outage in the entire year. Google also says that all of the information about any outage is registered on the Apps Status Dashboard and their engineers conduct a full analysis of every service disruption to make sure that it does not happen again.