Google+ shut down following cover-up of user data breach
News of data leaks from Google’s beleaguered social network was kept secret until the Wall Street Journal revealed all.
although Facebook has been hogging the negative headlines recently, Google’s rival social network, Google+, hasn’t been having a great time of it either, with the search company finally pulling the plug in October 2018.
For many people the writing has appeared to have been on the wall for a while now, with Google+ struggling for years to match Facebook’s popularity. While Google+ has remained popular with a small core of devotees, including many developers for open source projects, an internal memo has been revealed where Google admits that 90 percent of Google+ sessions lasted less than five seconds. That certainly paints of picture of people logging on to check Google+, seeing the lack of activity, and logging back off. However, it appears that the final nail in the coffin of Google+ was the revelation that a security bug, which allowed third-party app developers to access user’s data, including non-public profile information, had been exposing around 496,951 users since 2015. While Google has insisted there’s no evidence that any apps exploited the bug, what has upset people is that Google discovered and patched the bug in March, yet covered up about its existence. It was only the publication of a damning report by the Wall Street Journal (http://bit.ly/LXFWsJGoogle) that Google acknowledged the bug. Google announced a series of measures to counteract the bug known as ‘Project Strobe’ (http://bit.ly/ LXFProjectstrobe), which include the announcement that the consumer version of Google+ will be shut down over the next 10 months. While enterprise users will still be able to use Google+, this is all a rather ignoble demise for a social network that started off with some promise, but never realised its full potential.