User privacy is becoming increasingly important in today’s digital age. Data mining and information sharing has come to the forefront in recent weeks regarding Cambridge Analytica and Facebook and has brought user privacy into the limelight. This covers anything from Facebook to Twitter to email clients like Gmail and has caught the attention of lawmakers and will undoubtedly lead to a change in the way many companies do business and the services that they offer to the public as well as lead to fundamental changes in their product’s functionality.

Gmail is being redesigned

Google is the world’s largest tech company. Like with any tech company products will be redesigned and their Gmail product is no different. Recently Google announced that Gmail will be redesigned in the coming weeks and they have taken this opportunity to add in a few new privacy features for their users.

Now at the moment none of this has been officially announced so there could be more features added or some of the features may not pass beta testing and thus may not be implemented so take this with a grain of salt. It is from a leaked memo after all.

Some new features

Some of the new features include a Confidential Mode, which will prevent recipients of an email from forwarding, copying, printing and/or downloading an email. Of course there is seemingly no way to prevent someone from taking a screenshot so your data is still not completely safe but there’s not much Google can do to prevent that. Google is also working on a self-destructing email, which will make the email unreadable after a certain amount of time. Not quite a Get Smart-esque situation but still practical, though the CIA is surely working on a workaround.

Among the other new features that are probably being added are a smart reply and a snooze feature and there could be more. The smart reply feature has been available for the iOS app and Android app already and can handle replies when a person is occupied like when they are driving a car or sleeping. No timeline has yet been announced but Google traditionally makes product announcements at the I/O Conference which begins on May 8 so stay tuned.

Many of you use Gmail, whether it is with a personal account or with a business account. At Nicely Done Sites we use Gmail everyday and any new features, especially privacy features or autoreply features, will be great and will aid not only us but you as well. There is a chance as well that the layout of the program will change as well and just remember, we would be adjusting to a new layout too and it will take some time to get used to for all of us.

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