Gmail Says Use of Encrypted Emails Has Risen 25%

We use email every day, be it sending them for work or personal reasons or getting a thousand and one emails advertising everything from something you are interested in helping a foreign prince distribute their wealth. One way that you can be protected when sending emails is to send encrypted emails, something which has risen in use by 25% for Gmail users.

What caused this spur of encrypted emails? Google stated last year that they would start flagging up emails which were unencrypted, warning users which providers and emails were being sent from services that supported TLS encryption. This change came into effect in February this year, the end result of which was the 25% increase in encrypted emails that Gmail has reported in the last month.

Google isn’t acting alone on this, with Comcast, Microsoft, Yahoo and other companies in the industry looking to create SMTP, a new standard that could be used to help protect emails from man-in-the-middle attacks.

Combining all these with their recent push on security updates in Chrome and Android, including their use of two-factor authentication encryption and warning people about state-sponsored attacks on accounts, it’s becoming more and more clear that even in the digital world, companies want your private information to remain private.