Nothing like a good old fashioned data breach causing a service to go away. That’s what is happening to the Google+ social media network. Google+ suffered a massive data breach that exposed private information of users to third-party developers via a security vulnerability in a Google+ API. According to a Google blog post, “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.” Google only keeps two weeks worth of API logs so it can’t confirm the number of users impacted.
Apparently, the vulnerability has existed since 2015 and was discovered in March 2018. Google will shut down the consumer version of Google+ by the end of August 2019, but will keep the enterprise version operational. Google+ has never really had any traction at all. Why not just shut it down now for consumers and enterprise users? I don’t get it.
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