Google Plus To Shut Down After User Data Breach

Google on Monday announced that it will be shutting down the consumer version of its social media networking site Google Plus, after the news of a user data Breach. The company on Monday revealed that they have discovered a software glitch that may have exposed personal data of up to 500,000 customers.

It is said up to 438 applications made by other companies may have had access to the information through this vulnerability. The potential data includes ages, gender, relationship status, email addresses among other user information.

As per reports the company knew about the bug since March this year but did not disclose the information with its users till Monday when the Wall Street Journal revealed, about the bug in one of its articles. The company, however, has said that they did not share the news with the public as it had no information about the data being misused. The WSJ article says, “Google exposed the private data of hundreds of thousands of users of the Google+ social network and then opted not to disclose the issue this past spring, in part because of fears that doing so would draw regulatory scrutiny and cause reputational damage, according to people briefed on the incident and documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.”

Google executives opted not to disclose the problem at the time because they feared trouble from regulators. As some time ago the social media giant Facebook received intense criticism over its privacy woes due to its leak of user information to Cambridge Analytica.

However, Ben Smith, Google's vice president of engineering, confirmed in a blog post that the company indeed had detected a "bug" in March that impacted the profiles of as many as 500,000 Google Plus users. Further, he said that the company had immediately fixed the security flaw. And they had not uncovered any evidence that the information was mishandled.

Google will wind down the Google Plus network during a 10-month period.

Introduced in 2011, as a competitor to Facebook the social network site failed to gain popular appeal. In 2015 it was broken up into separate products. In the wake of the event, Google will wind down the Google Plus network during a 10-month period. Smith mentioned in his post that this is expected to be done by the end August 2019.

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