ΜFollowing a huge data breach originally published by the Wall Street Journal, Google today announced that it is closing its Google+ social network to consumers. The company eventually admitted that Google+ was never widely adopted by the public. According to a blog post, 90% of Google+ user sessions last less than five seconds. In light of these recently revealed concerns about the security of the Google+ API, the company chose to discontinue the service rather than try to make its social network more secure.
The company discovered an error in one of the Google+ APIs that allowed applications to access data from the Google+ profile that was not marked as public. It included static data fields such as name, email, occupation, gender and age. Did not include information from Google+ posts. The bug was fixed in March 2018, but Google did not notify users. "We created Google+ with a view to privacy, so we will only keep these API logs for two weeks," the company said in a blog post. "This means we can not confirm which users were affected by this error."
However, Google+ will continue to be a product for Enterprise users. It is by far the most popular use of the social network. Therefore, the company has decided that Google+ is better suited as an internal social network for companies and not as a consumer product. Google will announce new business-based products for Google+ in the near future.
The decision is part of Project Strobe, which is Google's in-house investigation into third-party access to Google and Android products. A careful look at security checks is required, as well as the low user involvement that may be due to privacy concerns. The aim is to identify areas where privacy controls should be tightened.
