Google is about to take a big step towards making accounts more secure: two-factor authentication enabled by default

May 7, 2021 08:45 GMT  ·  By

Google is committed to keeping user accounts more secure by enabling the two-factor authentication by default. 

The company wants you to stop relying on your password alone to protect your account.

In a blog post published on Thursday, the company stats that it plans to prompt users to enable the two-factor authentication. Accounts that already benefit from the setting are solely asked to confirm user identity. Soon, the two-factor authentication will become the norm for all accounts.

According to Google’s senior director of product management, Mark Risher, “Using their mobile device to sign in gives people a safer and more secure authentication experience than passwords alone,”

Passwords alone do not provide enough security anymore 

He continues "Passwords are the single biggest threat to your online security—they’re easy to steal, they’re hard to remember, and managing them is tedious,"

Two-factor authentication is a security feature that requires you to provide something else than your password to log into your account. A code sent to your phone or given by an ad hoc app like Google Authenticator or Authy may be that something else.

This is part of Google's push toward "a future where you won't need a password at all," and the announcement happens to coincide with the World Password Day. Even after several massive hacks and password dumps, Google reports that 66% of Americans "still admit to using the same password across multiple sites, which makes all those accounts vulnerable if one falls."

Google encourages customers to run through their fast security checkup to ensure the account settings and safeguards are up to date.

This is not the only step Google took to enhance Internet security. Starting with 2016, all websites that do not employ the HTTPS web encryption are flagged as unsecure. In a way, it can be viewed as a way to pressure websites to switch to a safer alternative.