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A privacy update being rolled out by Google will show if one's Gmail account is currently active from another location, and provides a way to shut off that remote usage.

Gmail became important when it debuted, bringing along 1GB of storage at a time when rival webmail services counted space in MB, sometimes charging for expanded capacity. With so much storage available, it followed naturally that many people would use it for all kinds of email, including private and personal messages.

The Gmail team at Google is in the process of rolling out an update to help control access to one's Gmail account. At the Gmail blog, Google detailed how the new feature shows if an account has an active sign-in from another location.

These account activity details show any active concurrent Gmail sessions, with the type of access and IP address connecting to Gmail. A click of a button signs off those concurrent sessions.

Google seems to have taken its sweet time starting the rollout of this new feature, which will be available to users of the Firefox and IE 7 browsers. Garett Rogers at Googling Google discovered its development last September, and wondered if Google's recent affection for all things privacy-related spurred its launch.