Yahoo will join Google in providing users of its email service with end-to-end encryption, helping to keep the private communications of people protected from the prying eyes of governments and hackers alike. The company made the announcement on stage at the Black Hat security conference earlier today.

According to Yahoo chief information security officer Alex Stamos, Yahoo will publish the source code of the effort later this year. His group “is working closely with Google to ensure that [its] implementations of end-to-end encryption are compatible,” the executive said in a statement.

Google announced its efforts to provide end-to-end encryption to its email users in early June. Hopefully, the Yahoo-Google alliance will spread to other webmail providers, allowing for a network of popular email services to pass encrypted messages between themselves, helping keep a majority of users more secure in their digital papers.

The context for the above are the Snowden revelations that have led technology companies to greatly tighten their information security. Yahoo and Google have previously announced measures to bolster their internal encryption following the revelation that the NSA was targeting the cables between their data centers abroad.

More encryption in ways that the average consumer can use is precisely what the market needs. Good on Yahoo for working on this.