Google LLC is gearing up to roll out an alerting feature that will enable users of its services to be notified more quickly if their accounts suffer a suspected breach.

The capability was announced today alongside several privacy enhancements. Google has security systems that actively look for suspicious activity in Google Accounts. When those systems flag a potential hack, the affected user is alerted via email or a mobile notification.

The new security feature being rolled out will notify users directly inside the Google service that they’re currently using. For example, if they’re browsing the Gmail app when suspicious activity is detected, an information box will appear in the Gmail interface letting them know that their accounts may have been compromised.

Helping users become aware of breaches sooner leaves hackers less time to carry out malicious actions such as downloading the victim’s personal files. The exact amount of time that the in-app security alerts save will likely vary, but Google executive Rahul Roy-Chowdhury noted in a blog post today that when the company started sending account breach alerts via Android notifications a few years ago, the number of people who saw the alerts within an hour jumped by a factor of 20.

Given that Google has billions of users worldwide, even small security improvements can have a positive impact on the overall safety of the web. “Safe Browsing protects more than 4 billion devices, Gmail blocks more than 100 million phishing attempts every day, and Google Play Protect scans over 100 billion apps every day for malware and other issues,” Rahul Roy-Chowdhury, Google’s vice president of product for privacy, noted in the post. 

The in-app security alerts will initially roll out to iOS in the coming weeks, according to The Verge. Availability on other platforms is slated to arrive early next year.

Google is pairing the security improvement with the introduction of a few privacy-preserving features. Google Assistant is receiving a Guest mode that, when activated, prevents a user’s interactions with the service from being saved to their account. In Google Maps, the company is making it easier to remove places saved to the user’s location history.

The search giant’s investments in security and privacy have yielded a few notable technological innovations. As part of their work, Google researchers in 2017 invented federated learning, a privacy-preserving technique that makes it possible to train a machine learning model on a user’s data without sending data to the cloud for processing. Federated learning has since proved to have useful applications in other fields, including malware detection. 

Image: Google