By now everyone knows that Google has threanted to dump their opearations in China after their certain Gmail accounts were hacked by Chinese. The issue was that most of these accounts were of Chinese dissidents inside China while some of them were even in Europe and the US.
Google has yesterday announced that all the Gmail accounts will be sent over secure servers. This means it will work by default on HTTPS rather than HTTP.
Gmail HTTPS
- Gmail allowed you to before use HTTPS by making those changes in your settings.
- This was used as usually unencrypted data travels faster than encrypted one.
- Now all of Gmail accounts will have default HTTPS. You can notice the difference the minute you log into your Gmail account.
- This is true for Gmail but not for all Google accounts.
- Using encryption is ideally known to be a good idea when using Gmail with Wifi, especially in a public space.
- If you want to disable the default HTTPS, you can make the changes at Settings.
Gmail HTTPS is actually not such a big deal. It did not really need to announce this on their blog as it is not really a new feature but just something that was optional is now by default. So was this a reaction or way to Google watchers that they will be a lot more secure. Remember inspite of support for Google over its complaints regarding their servers being attacked in China it might start a problem considering sometimes the media can be very paranoid as far as security concerns.
I think Google has known that it has stirred a hornet’s nest and to ease of anyone trying to indirectly imply that Chinese hackers could hack into Gmail because Google takes the security lightly; Google has thwarted such concerns by announcing all Gmail accounts will have default HTTPS.
What do you think? Is Gmail’s default HTTPS a reaction to the issue it has with China?