Due to high operating costs and a serious bug that allowed access to non-public user data, Google has decided to shut down its social network Google+.
Google+ as an unsuccessful competitor to Facebook
Google+ was launched back in 2011 and the platform aimed to compete with the then already popular Facebook. In the end, it turned out to be one of Google’s biggest failures. And to make matters worse, the fact that the personal data of up to half a million users was not fully protected from 2015 until March this year has come to light.
Data protection failures
The private data of hundreds of thousands of users was accessible to all app developers on the platform for about three years due to a problem discovered in the programming interface. Google admitted that this included the user’s name, email address, occupation, gender and age.
The flaw occurred in one of the application programming interfaces (APIs) used by Google+ app developers. There are reportedly more than 130 of these interfaces, which allow app developers to access public data from individual profiles. However, the failure occurred because data that was not marked as public was also within the apps’ reach.
Speaking is silver, silence is gold
According to The Wall Street Journal, this bug was discovered and fixed by Google back in March, but the company decided not to inform the public in order to preserve its reputation. If you are a Google+ user, you can rest easy – according to Google, there was no leak of sensitive data due to this bug.
But next August, the Google+ user section will disappear and remain active only for certain select companies. At the same time, Google announced that it will change its current permissions system for accessing accounts on Google+ as part of Project Strobe.
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