Today is Safer Internet Day, a moment for technology companies, nonprofit organizations, security firms, and people around the world to focus on online safety, together. To mark the occasion, we’re rolling out new tools, and some useful reminders, to help protect you from online dangers of all stripes—phishing, malware, and other threats to your personal information.

1. Keeping security settings simple

The Security Checkup is a quick way to control the security settings for your Google Account. You can add a recovery phone number so we can help if you’re ever locked out of your account, strengthen your password settings, see which devices are connected to your account, and more. If you complete the Security Checkup by February 11, you’ll also get 2GB of extra Google Drive storage, which can be used across Google Drive, Gmail, and Photos.

Safer Internet Day is a great time to do it, but you can—and should!—take a Security Checkup on a regular basis. Start your Security Checkup by visiting My Account.

2. Informing Gmail users about potentially unsafe messages

If you and your Grandpa both use Gmail to exchange messages, your connections are encrypted and authenticated. That means no peering eyes can read those emails as they zoom across the web, and you can be confident that the message from your Grandpa in size 48 font (with no punctuation and a few misspellings) is really from him!

However, as our Safer Email Transparency Report explains, these things are not always true when Gmail interacts with other mail services. Today, we’re introducing changes in Gmail on the web to let people know when a received message was not encrypted, if you’re composing a message to a recipient whose email service doesn’t support TLS encryption, or when the sender’s domain couldn’t be authenticated.

Here’s the notice you’ll see in Gmail before you send a message to a service that doesn’t support TLS encryption. You’ll also see the broken lock icon if you receive a message that was sent without TLS encryption.

If you receive a message that can’t be authenticated, you’ll see a question mark where you might otherwise see a profile photo or logo:

For more information, check out the Gmail and Google for Work blogs.

3. Protecting you from bad apps

Dangerous apps that phish and steal your personal information, or hold your phone hostage and make you pay to unlock it, have no place on your smartphone—or any device, for that matter.

Google Play helps protect your Android device by rejecting bad apps that don’t comply with our Play policies. It also conducts more than 200 million daily security scans of devices, in tandem with our Safe Browsing system, for any signs of trouble. Last year, bad apps were installed on fewer than 0.13% of Android devices that install apps only from Google Play.

Learn more about these, and other Android security features — like app sandboxing, monthly security updates for Nexus and other devices, and our Security Rewards Program—in new research we’ve made public on our Android blog.

4. Busting bad advertising practices

Malicious advertising “botnets” try to send phony visitors to websites to make money from online ads. Botnets threaten the businesses of honest advertisers and publishers, and because they’re often made up of devices infected with malware, they put users in harm’s way too.

We've worked to keep botnets out of our ads systems, cutting them out of advertising revenue, and making it harder to make money from distributing malware and Unwanted Software. Now, as part of our effort to fight bad ads online, we’re reinforcing our existing botnet defenses by automatically filtering traffic from three of the top ad fraud botnets, comprising more than 500,000 infected user machines. Learn more about this update on the Doubleclick blog.

Online security and safety are being discussed more often, and with more urgency, than ever before. We hope you’ll take a few minutes today to learn how Google protects your data and how we can work toward a safer web, for everyone.

Posted by Gerhard, VP Security and Privacy

Online security is on everyone’s mind these days. According to a recent Gallup poll, more people are worried about their online accounts being hacked than having their home broken into.

Security has always been a top priority for Google. Our Safe Browsing technology identifies unsafe websites and warns people before they visit them, protecting more than one billion Chrome, Firefox, and Safari users everyday. 2-Step Verification adds an extra layer of security, beyond your password, to your Google account; it’s like a second padlock on your account’s door. And our research teams regularly release new findings about nefarious online activity, like Gmail account hijacking attempts, so people can stay informed.

We have many protections in place to keep people, and their information, secure, but there's also a lot that you can do to protect yourself. Today, on Safer Internet Day, take a quick Security Checkup, an easy way to review and manage your Google Account’s security settings.

Here are some of the important items you can review during your Security Checkup:

• Recovery information: Adding a phone number can help us get in touch if you’re locked out of your account. We’ll only use your phone number to protect your account, unless you say otherwise.
• Recent activity: This is a quick overview of your recent sign-ins to Google. If you see any activity from a location or device you don’t recognize, change your password immediately.
• Account permissions: These are the apps, websites and devices connected to your Google account. Take a look and make sure you trust—and actually use—all of them. You might want to remove an old phone, or that dusty app you never use.

It takes just a few minutes to make sure your information is accurate and up to date. Visit your Account Settings and take your Security Checkup today.

Update: As an extra thank you, we’ll add 2GB to your Drive storage plan if you complete the Security Checkup by February 17. We’ll be granting the storage automatically to everyone around 28 February 2015 and we’ll send you an email when your adjustment is complete..

Posted by Andreas Tuerk, Product Manager

Technology can sometimes be complicated, but you shouldn’t have to be a computer scientist or security expert to stay safe online. Protecting our users is one of our top priorities at Google. Whether it’s creating easy-to-use tools to help you manage your information online or fighting the bad guys behind the scenes, we’re constantly investing to make Google the best service you can rely on, with security and privacy features that are on 24-7 and working for you.

Last year, we launched Good to Know, our biggest-ever consumer education campaign focused on making the web a safer, more comfortable place. Today, on Safer Internet Day, we’re updating Good to Know to include more tips and advice to help you protect yourself and your family from identity theft, scams and online fraud. You can also learn how to make your computer or mobile device more secure, and get more out of the web—from searching more effectively to making calls from your computer. And you can find out more about how Google works to make you, your device and the whole web safer.

For example, we encrypt the Gmail and Google Search traffic between your computer and Google - this protects your Google activity from being snooped on by others. We also make this protection, known as session-wide SSL encryption, the default when you’re signed into Google Drive. Because outdated software makes your computer more vulnerable to security problems, we built the Chrome browser to auto-update to the latest version every time you start it. It gives you up-to-date security protection without making you do any extra work.



We know staying safe online is important to you - and it is important to us too. So on Safer Internet Day, we’re participating in events in countries across Europe including: one hundred simultaneous online safety workshops with the Italian Postal Police; a Hangout between parliamentarian Trine Bramsen and 80 school kids from a primary school in Højby, Denmark; and a debate about inappropriate content online in Germany, with politicians from the Brandenburg state government and civil society groups. There, we'll be talking about our YouTube 361 campaign to encourage tolerance and respect online:



And in Brussels, we’ll be launching of a new educational handbook for 13-16 year-olds that we have helped develop in collaboration with InSafe, INHOPE, the European Commission, Liberty Global and European Schoolnet (the network of thirty Ministries of Education). The booklet, which will be available in multiple languages, has been extensively tested with young people across Europe, and will guide classroom discussions on digital footprints, reputation, rights and responsibilities online.

We've also been a part of Commissioner Neelie Kroes' Better Internet for Kids initiative, and now support - amongst other commitments - new ways to report harmful content online, including Second Friend and Net Ecoute.

Please find some time today to talk with friends and family about Internet safety. Take affirmative action by making your passwords stronger and turning on 2-step verification to protect your Google Account. And please also visit our new Good to Know site to find more tips and resources to help you stay safe online.

Posted by Alma Whitten, Director of Privacy, Product and Engineering

Telefono Azzurro, one of Italy’s main child protection NGOs, does amazing work on behalf of missing and sexually exploited children and their families. Last year, we donated a Google Search Appliance - essentially the Google ‘search engine in a box’ - to improve information retrieval on their internal network and make it easier to search on their public website.

Today, on Safer Internet Day 2012, we’re happy to announce that this collaboration is expanding. Telefono Azzuro will share its Search Appliance with all of the members of Missing Children Europe (MCE), the federation of national NGOs responsible for the European 116.000 phone hotline, who will use Google's search technology on their public websites. Eventually, the Search Appliance will also be linked to MCE’s interconnected European database of missing children (currently under construction), enabling each member NGO to better organise its own case files and conduct secure searches on its internal network.

This is just one example of how seriously we take the challenge of increasing safety on the web, but on Safer Internet Day, we’re also involved in a whole host of initiatives all over Europe, including:

Digital literacy education / workshops

• Italy: we’re running online safety workshops with Telefono Azzurro / Sicuri in Rete and with the Italian Postal and Communications Police (at more than 100 schools); and we’re distributing online safety information to parents together with the Italian Association of Paediatricians.
• Portugal: we’re launching the Google Family Safety Center at an event chaired by the President of National Commission for Support for Children.
• Russia: We’re partnering with Net Literacy to engage over 200 Russian journalism students in digital literacy campaigning in schools and communities

Events

• UK: we’re hosting online safety events with CEOP, the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, and Raceonline; we’re also participating in workshops organised by the UK Safer Internet Centre.
• Russia: we’re working with the Russia Safe Internet Centre and Russian Association of Electronic Communications to run a series of international expert panels at the Safer Internet Forum.
• Germany: Wieland Holfelder, Google Engineering Director, is keynoting a session on the platform for safe internet use at the Safer Internet Event in Germany, organized by Bitkom and the Ministry of Consumer Protection (BMELV).

Research

• UK: we're launching, together with YAW-CRC, new research funded by Google into how parents can keep their families safe online, and become more digitally literate themselves.

Technology

• France: we’re supporting the work of e-Enfance.org on a new Google Chrome browser extension called NetEcoute, which will make it easy for youngsters to start an online discussion with a helpline counselor.

These initiatives are part of our global outreach on Safer Internet Day - but we hope that each of them will - in their own way - be a step forward for online safety education.

Posted by Laura Bononcini, Senior Policy Analyst, Google