Tracking Google Account Activity
Keeping track of the activity log of your Gmail is of paramount importance as it’s the first tier of security Google offers to prevent data breach and unauthorized access to your mails, confidential information, and data.
The internet took over the world of business by storm and with its power, connectivity and communication reached new heights. Mailbox, created by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1965 was the first of its kind electronic mailing service (although it was only used inside the campus) but by 1971, SNDMSG by CPYNET, developed the first, then state of the art, networked mailing service. Since then a lot of different companies have joined the race to develop a secure server where emails can be sent and received without worrying about data breaching.
“Competition is always a good thing. It forces us to do our best. A monopoly renders people complacent and satisfied with Mediocrity.” - Nancy Pearcy.
Since the 21st century, Google, IBM, Microsoft and a host of other technology companies have been competing to develop secure mailing services for business enterprises. Security is the utmost important requirement for any company to protect itself from corporate espionage.
Since the boom of the smartphone industry, anyone from any geographical location and having internet access can receive and send emails which made it easier to communicate and collaborate with colleagues in real-time.
A lot of time corporates including CIOs, CTOs, and CEOs need to be at different geographic locations for work and might not be able to carry laptops and chargers with them. So they have to access their emails through their phones, which creates a security issue as hacking a smartphone is easier than hacking a server for stealing or copying confidential business data.
Google dove deep into this matter and came up with a simple & ingenious way to track the account log-in activities. It enables you to check for any suspicious and/or malicious incidents like logging-in to your mail from a different IP address. Also, it will show the location and time at which Gmail was logged-in for the last 10 times. It is very easy, even a layman can check and keep track of the same. All you need to do is click on the details as shown in figure 1.
After clicking it, a new window will pop open. Which will look like figure 2. There you can check:
Whether or not your email was logged-in from any suspicious location.
Note: This feature only shows for activities when the account logs in and logs out.
2. Its log contains up to 10 entries.
3. It also gives us the ability to sign out from all devices at times of suspicious activity to secure it and protect it from further data breaches. And it will show as displayed in figure 3.
