Google is celebrating "Safer Internet Day 2016", and as part of the festivities, it's inviting users of its services to run a "Security Checkup" to verify that everything is in order. The process takes less than two minutes, but it also comes with a gift: two extra gigabytes of space in Google Drive.
Cloud storage is plentiful these days. If you're willing to combine more than one service, you can get several gigabytes of space at no cost. Ideally, you'd have everything under one platform, but free accounts are just a stepping stone to bigger plans when needed. Take Google Drive: its free account offers 15 gigabytes that should be enough for most users. However, today we have the chance to add 2 GB extra by carrying out a very simple task: completing the Security Checkup on our Google account.
Basically, the checkup is divided into three steps. First, you verify the information to recover your account, including a secondary email and the secret question. Anyone who wants to add a phone number as extra protection can do so at this step, but if there's no number registered, you have to press "Skip" to move on. The second step verifies connected devices. Both smartphones and computers with access to your account and/or services will appear here. Finally, the last step shows the special permissions granted to apps, Google Docs plugins, and mobile operating systems.
Once the checkup is finished, just go to the storage section in Google Drive and hover over the graph to confirm that the 2 GB bonus has been activated. Unfortunately, we have no idea how long this gift will last. After all, a common decision among cloud storage offers is that space bonuses are "temporary," like the 100 gigabytes that OneDrive handed out, which will expire in two weeks.
"To celebrate Safer Internet Day 2016, we added 2 GB of free storage in Drive to your Google account because you completed the security checkup."
Two extra gigabytes in Google Drive probably isn't much, but for a two-minute task, we'll take it.
