Google adds phishing protection to Workspace apps

Google's Workspace productivity apps will get the same phishing and malware protection that Gmail already has later this year, the company said at its annual I/O conference.

Slides, Docs and Sheets will alert users to phishing and malware links, and automatically redirect them to safety, Google said.

Google claims Gmail currently blocks more than 99.9 per cent of spam and phishing messages.

As part of an industry initiative between W3C, the FIDO Alliance, Microsoft, and Apple, Google will add auto enrolment of two-step verification (2SV) for user authentication, to reduce phishing attacks and account takeovers.

A safety status indicator in Google apps will also alert users if they need to take action to secure their accounts.

Google introduced the Protected Computing toolkit that features privacy-enhancing techniques such edge processing and ephemerality to reduce personally identifiable data, and user data will be further anonymised through blurring, randomising of identifiable signals and the addition of statistical noise.

End to end encryption and hardware secure enclaves that make user data inaccessible for outsiders, including Google, will also be part of Protected Computing.

New AI powered Workspace features

Workspace customers will also get artificial intelligence driven video and audio quality enhancements for Meet to deal with poor network connections, lighting and webcams.

Meet will also have automated meeting transcriptions and summaries, to be released later this year.

Natural language processing (NLP) for the Spaces chat app will be used to extend Docs' built in summaries to Spaces, to provide digests of conversations for users.