Google+ social media platform to be killed following privacy flaw revelations
Google knew about a privacy flaw in its Google+ social media platform that exposed users’ personal information for over six months before finally reporting the problem in a blog post this morning.
In the post, Google announced it was closing down the service after the Wall Street Journal revealed the company had known about the bug, which affected all Google+ users, since March this year.
Google+ was heavily promoted after its 2011 launch, in the hope of overtaking Facebook in the early days of social media.
The news comes just two weeks after Facebook revealed nearly 50m users had been affected by a similar privacy lapse.
In the Google+ incident, which the Wall Street Journal claims was kept hidden to avoid a regulatory backlash, users’ details including names, dates of birth, relationship data, employers and job titles were potentially available to developers with access to its APIs.
“Our review showed that our Google+ APIs, and the associated controls for consumers, are challenging to develop and maintain. Underlining this, as part of our Project Strobe audit, we discovered a bug in one of the Google+ People APIs,” Google said in its announcement.
“We discovered and immediately patched this bug in March 2018. We believe it occurred after launch as a result of the API’s interaction with a subsequent Google+ code change.
“We made Google+ with privacy in mind and therefore keep this API’s log data for only two weeks. That means we cannot confirm which users were impacted by this bug. However, we ran a detailed analysis over the two weeks prior to patching the bug, and from that analysis, the Profiles of up to 500,000 Google+ accounts were potentially affected. Our analysis showed that up to 438 applications may have used this API.
“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.”
A Google Australia spokesperson was unable to say how many local users were affected by the flaw, saying: “Every year, we send millions of notifications to users about privacy and security bugs and issues. Whenever user data may have been affected, we go beyond our legal requirements and apply several criteria focused on our users in determining whether to provide notice.
“Our Privacy and Data Protection Office reviewed this issue, looking at the type of data involved, whether we could accurately identify the users to inform, whether there was any evidence of misuse, and whether there were any actions a developer or user could take in response. None of these thresholds were met here.”
The review did highlight the significant challenges in creating and maintaining a successful Google+ that meets consumers’ expectations. Given these challenges and the very low usage of the consumer version of Google+, we decided to sunset the consumer version of Google+.”
Google+ will be closing down in August next year, however the company said it was looking at continuing an enterprise version of the product with greater user controls.
lol. what’s Google+?
User ID not verified.
A social media platform, similar to Facebook. Superior to Facebook in some ways, and Facebook was definitely inspired by Google+ allowing users to control the audience their content went to (“friends lists”).
When you think about the crap we’re left with – Twitter (which is awful) and Facebook (which never listens to its customers), any alternative sounds good.
User ID not verified.