Dan Goodin reports:
On Tuesday, Google made client-side encryption available to a limited set of Gmail and Calendar users in a move designed to give them more control over who sees sensitive communications and schedules.
Client-side encryption is a generic term for any sort of encryption that’s applied to data before it’s sent from a user device to a server. With server-side encryption, by contrast, the client device sends the data to a central server, which then uses keys in its possession to encrypt it while it’s stored. This is what Google does today. (To be clear, the data is sent encrypted through HTTPS, but it’s decrypted as soon as Google receives it.)
Google’s client-side encryption occupies a middle ground between the two.
Read more at Ars Technica.