Did you know October is National Cybersecurity Awareness Month? The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) invented it to highlight its collaborative effort between government and industry to raise awareness about the importance of cybersecurity and to ensure that all Americans have the resources they need to be safer and more secure online.
In case you were wondering, DHS says that this year’s overarching message is, “Own IT. Secure IT. Protect IT.”
I’m inspired! And, apparently, so is Alphabet. Google begins its observance of Cybersecurity Awareness Month with new privacy tools for Google, YouTube and Google Assistant.
As you know, Chrome incognito mode isn’t really incognito, but starting this month, when you use Google Maps in incognito mode you will actually be incognito. Google won’t save your Maps history. Yeah!
YouTube will add Google’s rolling auto-delete browser/location history feature. So, now you can set your YouTube history to auto-delete at specific time intervals. I’m not sure why you would ever need to do this. But now you can.
And, just because Amazon just released the same feature for Alexa-enabled devices, you can now configure Google Assistant to wipe your recent voice commands. Another solution in search of a problem brought to you by the super-paranoid. (Hint: every single keystroke and every single tap and every single movement of the accelerometer in your phone is tracked — transcriptions of voice commands are the very least of your privacy issues.)
Author’s note: This is not a sponsored post. I am the author of this article and it expresses my own opinions. I am not, nor is my company, receiving compensation for it.
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