I’m quite excited to be speaking at the RSA Conference this week in San Francisco, joined by thousands of security professionals from around the world. If you’re attending RSA, please visit Room 2004 at 2:20 p.m. tomorrow. I’ll talk a bit about my experience in the security industry and share some of the challenges and advantages I’ve experienced protecting users and customers at Google. Like many professionals visiting the conference, I became interested in security many years ago because it was a challenging, exciting and intellectually fascinating area. Back then, very few of us could have predicted how those challenges would grow in scale and complexity. But the technology available to address those challenges has also evolved, and today I see a safer Internet within reach.
When we think about innovation at Google, most of us think about balloons delivering wireless access or driverless cars. But for many years, we've been innovating at scale with security as well. Google has a long history of accelerating innovation and facilitating the adoption of new technology — like two-step verification (2SV), Security Keys, SSL encryption and even removing spam in email. Remember when spam was going to cripple email in the 90’s? Today, spam is down to less than 0.1% for the average Gmail user — one of the earliest and finest examples of applying massive computing power and machine learning to solve a big security challenge. We believe technology can help solve more of the challenges we face.
For example, today we’re adding new features to our Data Loss Prevention solution in Gmail. For users, security should just work. Because sensitive information can reside not just in text documents, but also in scanned copies and images, DLP for Gmail now uses Optical Character Recognition. We've also introduced additional detection parameters for fine-grained policy control and offer broader coverage of HIPAA data and personally identifiable information (PII) globally.
Many of us today see how large cloud providers play an increasing role in keeping our important information secure. At Google, we’re certainly putting our shoulder to the wheel.
To learn more about Google on security, check out my recent roundtable discussion on Medium. See you tomorrow in San Francisco!