In one of the events and special offers marking Safer Internet Day – February 10th – Google is reaching out to users of its Google Drive cloud storage service to run through an online security checkup, with the carrot of 2GB of free storage added on to the existing storage offer.

“While everything stored in Drive is always encrypted in transit and at rest in Google’s custom-built data centers, this checkup ensures you’re making the most of the 24/7 protection you already get from Google,” the announcement states. “As our way of saying thanks for completing the checkup by 17 February 2015, we’ll give you a permanent 2 gigabyte bump in your Google Drive storage plan.”

The fairly routine checkup on your existing account information and recovery options has a few wrinkles specifically for Google/Android fans, in particular the runthrough of devices, apps, and programs authorized to access your Google account details. This is definitely a value add for assiduous Android users, and a global security check that reaches much further than a single account on a single website.

“We’ll be granting the storage automatically to everyone around 28 February 2015 and we’ll send you an email when your adjustment is complete,” Google adds, although it also indicates that “Google Apps for Work and Google Apps for Education users are not eligible for the bonus storage but should still consider taking the Security Checkup.”

As a comparison, those extra two gigabytes from Google equal 2048 megabytes, or 475 King James Bibles’ worth of text, each of those 783,137 words long, which would equal over 4000 full-length novels. Quite some shelf space.

Meanwhile, Safer Internet Day (SID) itself “is organised by Insafe in February of each year to promote safer and more responsible use of online technology and mobile phones, especially amongst children and young people across the world.” Insafe was launched as part of the European Commission’s Safer Internet Programme, and it’s to be hoped that it doesn’t become a front for DRM advocates and censorious governments, as many other similar initiatives have.

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