After a controversial year, filled with worry about governmental invasions of privacy, Twitter is adding additional security to its systems to assure that customer data is kept safe, secure, and private from the prying eyes of cyber criminals and shady government surveillance specialists alike. According to ZDNet, Twitter is adding what is called “forward secrecy” to its system communications, a form of future-proof protection that will help to defend against decryption for years to come.

While it isn’t immediately clear what forward secrecy will mean for the average Twitter user – since most interactions on Twitter are of a social, publicly visible vein – the company’s decision to implement forward secrecy could still mark the growth of a new major trend in the internet world.

Indeed, Twitter isn’t even the first major internet company to break the ice on forward secrecy. Earlier this week, Google unveiled its own default forward secrecy plans with a blogpost discussing the matter. The practical uses for forward secrecy are significantly clearer for Google and its users than they are for Twitter, considering how much information Google customers exchange via Gmail, the company’s free webmail application.

Unsurprisingly, Google described forward secrecy using Gmail as its prime example. According to the web giant’s blog, major sites running in a “non-forward secret fashion” may have suitable encryption on emails today, but could become vulnerable if a hacker had the foresight to save encrypted and unreadable emails for a later date.

“An encrypted, unreadable email could be recorded while being delivered to your computer today,” the Google blogpost explained. “In ten years time, when computers are much faster, an adversary could break the server private key and retrospectively decrypt today’s email traffic.”

Future secrecy protects against these future attacks by requiring “that the private keys for a connection are not kept in persistent storage.” In other words, future secrecy will make it much more difficult for the unsavory internet gurus of the future, be they private hackers or federal surveillance goons, to decrypt large swaths of user data at once.

Since Twitter does not have an email client – and since even the Direct Message function doesn’t often see the exchange of serious or sensitive information – it is difficult to envision just how much future hackers could gain from decrypting the site’s communications. However, Twitter’s decision to implement forward secrecy – and to be ahead of the curve on user data protection, especially – is a huge boon for the company’s public image as a champion of customer privacy. Since Twitter recently pulled off a successful IPO of its stock, it is possible that the company is merely playing the PR game in an effort to boost its valuation.