Google Launches End-to-End Chrome Extension for Encrypted Emails

It sure looks like privacy is the need of the hour with users getting cautious about sharing information online. This privacy phenomenon is extending to emails as well. Google announced on Wednesday a new Chrome extension called End-to-End for sending and receiving Emails securely on the browser, apart from releasing its email transparency report.

Essentially, the End-to-End Chrome extension is a security tool that provides end-to-end encryption. For example, once a user sends a mail the content leaving the browser will be encrypted until the intended recipient decrypts it. Moreover, encrypted emails sent to the user will remain encrypted until and unless he/she decrypts it.

There are tools like these that already exist but Google promises that its solution won't be complicated to use. The company says, "While end-to-end encryption tools like PGP and GnuPG have been around for a long time, they require a great deal of technical know-how and manual effort to use. To help make this kind of encryption a bit easier, we're releasing code for a new Chrome extension that uses OpenPGP, an open standard supported by many existing encryption tools."

Currently, End-to-End is not on the Chrome Web Store yet and is available as an alpha release for the developer community to test and evaluate it, to make sure that it's as secure as it needs to be before people start relying on it. Google hasn't provided an exact release date yet either. However, the company has a