Google’s third try at social network has it non-plussed

Google parent company Alphabet Inc. announced Monday that it is shutting down its social network, Google+.

The company cited two major factors in its decision to end the service: its small and unengaged user base, and a newly announced privacy lapse affecting up to

500,000 users.

The consumer version of Google+ will be wound down over 10 months, ending by August, the company said. According to the statement announcing the death of the service, 90 percent of Google+ user sessions lasted less than five seconds.

The company said that it will be focusing on the enterprise version of Google+, which was unaffected by the privacy problem. Corporate customers use Google+ as an internal discussion network.

Google said it discovered the privacy vulnerability in March, which allowed third-party apps integrated with Google+ to access personal details that the user had marked as private, including name, work experience, birth date, email address and places lived.

Shortly before Google’s Monday announcement, The Wall Street Journal reported that Google executives were informed of the privacy breach in March, at which point they fixed the problem. But Google chose to not disclose it to users or the public for fear of tarnishing its image, the Journal said.

According to the report, a memo that Google’s legal team prepared for senior executives said that going public with the breach would likely trigger “immediate regulatory interest” at a time when Facebook Inc. was coming under fire for not preventing the data firm Cambridge Analytica from accessing troves of user information.

Google+, which was launched in 2011, is just the latest of Google’s social networks to limp into the grave.

The Gmail-integrated Google Buzz was dogged by privacy concerns within days of its 2010 debut.

An earlier Google social network called Orkut launched in 2004 and gained a mass user base in India and Brazil by the late 2000s but was ultimately shut down in September 2014.