American tech company Google unveils French version of Protect Your Election

Google's release comes ahead of the first round of French presidential elections on April 23, 2017.

American tech company Google has released a set of tools it says are designed to protect elections globally.

Jigsaw, which is run by Google's parent company Alphabet, has been distributing the free suite, whose French version was released on Tuesday, more than a month before the first round of presidential elections in the European country.

Company officials maintain that the suite aims at protecting “free expression.”

"Defense of free expression is at the core of Jigsaw's mission," said Jigsaw Head of Communications and Senior Advisor Dan Keyserling. "And protecting elections websites is critical to that."

The suite includes tools to confront cheap digital attacks like phishing and distributed denial of service (DDoS).

Data breaches amid elections have raised concerns over the cybersecurity of elections globally.

“There’s a spike in the most common forms of digital attacks during elections,” Keyserling said, alleging that the tools helped protect a website coming under DDoS attack during the recent Dutch elections.

People prepare their ballots to vote in the Dutch general elections in The Hague on March 15, 2017. (Photo by AFP)

Jigsaw and Google could not stop the attack; however, they managed to keep it online during the attack using a service named Project Shield, Keyserling said.

“We try to be very transparent about what the criteria are for signing up for Shield… We view DDoS attacks generally as sort of a bug in the internet—a tactic that shouldn’t be available to anybody.”

According to American tech magazine Wired, “The innovation here isn’t the tools themselves, but packaging them in a way that makes them accessible to the people who need them most.”