Here's something you might now know - for a while now, Google's had an extra-high level of cybersecurity that can be applied to people's accounts if they're particularly at risk of malicious hacking attempts or online attacks.

This covers professions like journalism, politicians, activists and election workers, among others, and has been around since 2017, giving people extra layers of security to ensure they're safe from attacks. 

It limits access to your Google accounts and services more rigidly than otherwise, to make sure that unauthorised processes can't get access. However, until now it's had a slightly annoying drawback. Namely, you couldn't have your Google account signed up for both the Advanced Protection Program and for use as a Nest account in your smart home.

Now, though, a blog post from the security team at Google has confirmed that users can use both Nest devices and the Advanced Protection Program at the same time, tying up a feature that's apparently been heavily requested by the relevant users for some time. 

That makes sense, at it's always annoying to be locked out of mutually useful services, not least when cyberattacks on people and organisations' smart devices are becoming more and more prevalent. 

Google has been beefing up security for its Nest devices in the last few months, leading up to this change, including the addition of reCAPTCHA verification layers to make it harder to people to spoof logins. All of which should hopefully serve to reassure anyone worried about security risks from their smart home.