Google is going to shut down their social media platform they call Google+. Recently Google discovered a data breach that allowed developers to access private data of profile users. However, Google states there is no evidence that developers knew about the bug. Additionally, there was no evidence that the data was misused.
With news of the data breach being made public, Google admitted that Google+ did not live up to expectations. In fact, 90% of all user sessions lasted less than 5 seconds. At the launch of Google +, there was a significant effort by Google to encourage users to the social media platform. Google+ The rational for adopting Google+ was that it would help personalize a user’s search results. A user’s search would pull up companies within the +1 connections. Due to the data breach, Google has announced it will shut down Google+ over a 10-month period, which will be completed by August.
More on the Google+ Security Breach
During a security audit, Google discovered the following:
- A bug found in one of the Google+ People APIs meant that apps also had access to profile fields that were shared with the user, but not marked as public.
- Breached data is limited to static, optional Google+ Profile fields including name, email address, occupation, gender and age.
- The data breach does not include any other data a user may have posted or connected to Google+ or any other service.
- The bug was discovered and immediately patched in March 2018.
- The profiles of up to 500,000 Google+ accounts were potentially affected.
- Google cannot confirm which users were specifically impacted by this bug.
- There’s no evidence that any developer was aware of this bug or abusing the API.
- There’s no evidence that any profile data was misused.
