Just months after Google announced the big news of shutting down Google Plus, it confirms that it will finally close all doors of Google Plus in April.
Google first discovered the bug in March 2018. A bug in the API allowed third party developers to access data about the user. It is almost at the same time when Facebook got into trouble that got Mark Zuckerberg facing the Congress.
Google however covered up their vulnerability and decided to not to disclose the data leak to avoid the authority interference and maintain the a reputed public relations. The incorporation did not want to risk coming to spotlight like Facebook back in March. The choice to remain silent, which cocked eyebrows in the cybersecurity network, comes against the background of moderately new principles in California and Europe that oversee when an organization must unveil a security breach.
In an official blog post Google accepted the responsibility and addressed important issues. Disclosures were made that user names, email, gender, age may have been visible to third parties but confidential data like financial details, numbers or posts from Google accounts were not accessed. Assumptions by Google are made that the dada leak may affect up-to 500,000 user accounts.
Google Vice President of Product Management David Thacker last year reported that “No third party compromised our systems, and we have no evidence that the app developers that inadvertently had this access for six days were aware of it or misused it in any way.” Google Vice President of Engineering Ben Smith wrote in a blog post that “We found no evidence that any developer was aware of this bug, or abusing the API, and we found no evidence that any profile data was misused.”
On 30th January, 2019 Google released another blog post confirming the shut down date. It also mentions that user will not be able to join Google+ or create new accounts from 4th February, 2019. Visit the blog to know more about how this shutdown or change is going to affect and what can you do about your Google+ account.