The Gmail Team over at Google has just added some new security and protection features that will leave some of their users feeling a bit more at ease that their email account is safe. Starting yesterday, Google began rolling out a feature that will allow users to view the time of their last activity on their Gmail account and whether or not it’s still open in another location.
To give you an example: You wake up in the morning and log-in to your Gmail account from your home computer to check your email before heading out the door to work. When you get to work, you log-in and scroll down to the bottom of your inbox where Gmail now displays recent activity and you see that an account is open in another location. Because it displays the IP address for all of the sessions (both open and recent), you are able to determine that the account open in another location is just your computer at home. Google provides you with information like the access type (was it a browser, mobile, POP3, etc.), IP address, and the date/time the account was visited. What’s great is that once you see that you are logged in somewhere else, you can use the other new feature which allows you to remotely sign-out of that account.
Some of you are probably concerned because now you know for sure that Google is tracking this information and that they have stats on you. At the same time, you know darn well that they have been keeping track of this information, it’s just now they are making it useful to you. Wouldn’t it be great if other sites started to implement something similar? We’re thinking PayPal would be a great site to have a feature like this. There are so many security issues with PayPal, and something like this would give users a little more reassurance that their account with PayPal is safe because they’d know if someone else had access to it.
In typical Google fashion, they are rolling these new security features out slowly. Neither Ryan or I have them yet, so we’re using the screenshot that Google provided to share with you. You’ll see the button to “sign out all other sessions” and then you’ll be able to see recent activity:
Let us know if you already have this feature and what you think of it…
wrong spelling “gamil”
Nice post, I’m off to check my gamil now.
Thanks guys… it’s fixed. That’s what happens when our fingers get away from us.
Great! I hope this makes its way into other web applications – I have wanted something like this for a long time, and it should come as no surprise to me that Google is finally breaking the ice. Of course, I’m sure it is placing an additional strain on their servers, and is yet one more thing that their software must keep track of. As a computer scientist, their reliability and scalability never ceases to amaze.
IMHO this feature is more important than labels and all the other things that came with the initial introduction (and later) of gmail. Can’t wait for it to show up in my account.
It is pretty important, and I’m glad to see Google offering this feature. Anything that helps keep me more secure makes me happy.
finally showed up for me
Awesome feature…just look at the speed of innovation coming from Gmail. I’ve begun my painful transition from Live Hotmail to Gmail.
Same here, it looks like I just got the feature.
Switching email accounts is never something that’s fun to do. Good luck!
Yep, I’ve got this feature, seems very handy. At one point I did suspect someone had managed to get my account opened elsewhere, probably from a networked PC at Uni. I changed my password straight away and nothing seemed to go wrong, but this feature would have been useful then and I’m glad Google have implemented it.
Convenient and creepy at the same time. This is just the tip of the iceberg of all the data that Google collects about its users…
I finally got the feature and it’s definitely nice to have if you suspect someone else is accessing your account. Certainly Google collects a lot of information about their users, but to be fair, lots of other sites including Yahoo do as well.
Don’t forget though that people can use that power against you too. If a thief finds out you’re about to find out that he’s accessing your account, he can just terminate your session and quickly change the password. It’s just a matter of speed now.
I know, their super long URLs frighten me!
(On the other hand, Google seems to use JavaScripts instead of long URLs to hide this behavior.) Makes you wonder what these URLs say about you and your habits. Fortunately, I can block their web beacons with Adblock Plus.
The password management is done through Google services though, and so a thief would really have to know your existing password to be able to change it. If that’s the case the first thing they’d probably do after logging in would be to change the password, thereby locking you out.
Most vulnerabilities that would give someone access to your account would only give the perpetrator access to your Gmail account, and any attempt of trying to change your password (which is done in the Google Account manager) would probably be unsuccessful. So this can be helpful in instances like these.
Just used this feature today to prove someone had been accessing my account. It’s a very useful feature in terms of security.
However, it reveals exactly what many already knew or suspected about the information Google retains on its users (Not that any other website out there doesn’t or couldn’t do the same). The biggest issue with Web 2.0 is privacy. With greater (social) interaction on websites that are becoming more dynamic when compared to the very static pages of Web 1.0, comes greater privacy concerns.