Back in December, Google announced the availability of Data Loss Prevention in Gmail for Google Apps Unlimited customers.

This week at the RSA Conference in San Francisco, Google VP of Security & Privacy Engineering Gerhard Eschelbeck spoke, and announced new features for the DLP solution in Gmail.

The first feature is optical character recognition (OCR) for better scanning of attachments.

“Sensitive information can reside not just in text documents, but in scanned copies and images as well,” Google explains. “With the new OCR enhancement, DLP policies can now analyze common image types, and extract text for policy evaluation. Admins have the option to enable OCR in the Admin console at the organizational-unit (OU) level for both the Content compliance and Objectionable content rules.”

Secondly, Google has added additional predefined content detectors.

“Our Work customers span the globe, and we are committed to providing customers in all countries with plug-and-play DLP policies,” it says. “Towards this goal, we are pleased to announce the introduction of new detectors which cover personally identifiable information (PII) in several additional countries, and provide better coverage for HIPAA data as well.”

The company also introduced two new detection parameters to give its largest Work customers better control over DLP policies, minimize false positives, and “take action commensurate with the level of perceived risk.” There is a count parameter and a confidence parameter. The former lets customers set up different DLP policies based on whether a message contains individual or bulk PII. The latter lets customers tighten or loosen detection criteria for the most commonly used detectors.

Google has a data loss prevention whitepaper available here. You can also read this post, which looks at some of the company’s efforts throughout the past year. More comments from Eschelbeck here.

Image via Wikimedia Commons