Google mail gets new security features

GOOGLE SEEMS TO BE trying to prove it does, in fact, give a hoot about people’s privacy, after a judge’s order on Thursday forced the company to turn over all Youtube user records had privacy groups spitting teeth.

To make good, Google says it has started rolling out a new privacy feature to let Gmail users see how many computers their account is open on, and let them sign-out remotely. This will be a fairly welcome development because, until today, the only way to log out after stupidly forgetting to properly log off on a public computer was to change passwords. That is, if a user was even aware that his/her account was freely accessible on another computer in the first place.

Now, not only can a user log off remotely from other computers, he can also apparently check to see if anyone has been snooping in his account.

In a footer link which says 'details', users can purportedly check their 'concurrent session information', showing them all open sessions, along with IP address and 'access type', whether the email was opened through iGoogle, POP3 or a mobile phone. For example, if you see that your email is being accessed through POP3 and you don’t access your mail this way, it’s fairly safe to assume someone else is sifting their way through your hundreds of thousands of soppy love letters, embarrassing pics, and spam.

Under 'Recent activity', paranoid users can even apparently check whether there was any suspicious activity on their Gmail account at times when they weren’t using it. The table shows all recent account history along with times of access and IP numbers used to access the account.

Unfortunately, we’re going to have to take Google’s word for it for now, as none of the Gmail accounts we checked had the mysterious 'details' tab in the footer.

Hopefully Google won’t be keeping the privacy options private for too long though. µ