Google Good to Know A guide to staying safe and secure online - Manual (Page 11)

Helping combat identity theft
Google uses a variety of technologies to help protect you from online identity
theft and make sure your Google Account stays safe and secure.
2-step verification
To bring even stronger levels of protection to your Google Account, we offer
2-step verification to our users. This tool adds an extra layer of security by
requiring not just a password, but also a verification code to sign in to a Google
Account. Even if your password is cracked, guessed, or otherwise stolen, an
attacker can’t sign in to your account without entering the verification code
we’ll send to your mobile phone.
Encryption
Google takes many steps to keep your
personal information safe from attackers
and snoops. By default, we encrypt the
Gmail connection between your computer
and Google – this helps protect 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 and
many other services.
Working to help keep your
computer and device clean
You can help protect your computer from malware, but Google also works
hard to help protect you too, with hundreds of security experts working
around the clock to help ensure your data and devices are secure.
Helping you avoid malware
Just like Google searches the web for sites with the best answers to your
questions, we also look for sites that appear to be harmful to users or
have malware on them. Every day we identify and flag more than 10,000 of
those unsafe sites, and we show warnings on as many as 14 million Google
search results and 300,000 downloads, telling our users that there might be
something suspicious going on behind a particular website or link.
Helping you keep your mobile device safe
Smartphones running Google’s Android software have similar protections in
place to reduce the risk of damage. Android also requires that every app in
the Google Play store list what kind of information the app wants to collect or
access from your device, so you can decide whether you trust the app or not.
We also automatically scan Google Play to block and remove harmful apps,
and for some Android phones, our
Google Application Verifying Service
will check for potentially harmful
applications no matter where
you are installing them from.