Google Is Shutting Google Plus Four Months Early, After Second Data Leak

In October 2018, Google announced that it would shut down its popular social network, Google Plus. The reason behind this was partly because there was a massive security breach affecting almost 500,000 users. And now, there’s one more reason.

Google Plus was supposed to go offline in August 2019, but this has now been moved up to April. This is due to the new data leak. The API access to Google Plus will close much before that i.e. within the next 90 days.

It is said that approximately 52.5 million users could get affected by the newest system breach. Their personal information could be exposed to developers like their name, email address and occupation even if their profiles are not public. In addition to this, if profile data was shared with even one user can be easily available to third-party apps.

Google admitted that this breach of secuirty came into picture when one private user’s data was exposed to developers for three whole years. This was not disclosed until it was revealed in an article by the Washington Post in October. Luckily, this second leak was around in just 6 days before the company discovered it between November 7 to November 13.

The blog post reads, “”With the discovery of this new bug, we have decided to expedite the shut-down of all Google+ APIs; this will occur within the next 90 days. In addition, we have also decided to accelerate the sunsetting of consumer Google+ from August 2019 to April 2019. While we recognize there are implications for developers, we want to ensure the protection of our users.”

Source: Indiatimes.com