The NSA spying scandal is everything but dead, prompting major tech companies to react accordingly. In that sense we have Google — as one of the biggest opponents of the U.S. government’s questionable (to say the least) practices — looking to keep Gmail users’ privacy intact.
According to the Venture Beat report, the search giant’s idea is to add PGP-based encryption in Gmail. While that’s already possible, PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) set up is everything but easy, thus the majority of folks don’t use this option. So what Google wants to do is make PGP easier to use in Gmail.
Although this work is still in the exploratory phase, we hope to see some tangible results sooner rather than later.
At present, Google relies on SSL/TLS for data transmission which does offer encryption but it’s not as nearly as strong as that of PGP.