Google has closed its social media platform Google+ after the personal information of 500,000 users was exposed from it. The announcement was made on a Monday blog post, which marked Google’s first public description of the privacy bug. Google intentionally avoided revealing the problem faced at the time.
The Google Plus mishap could have allowed up to 438 external apps to scoop up usernames, email addresses, genders, occupations, and ages without authorization report Times of Israeli. The company informed it did not find any proof that any of the personal information affected by the Plus breach was misused.
The timeline laid out by Google signify that the company discerned the privacy lapse around the same time that FB was under fire for a leak in it’s far more famous social media network. Facebook’s data breach leaked the individual information of as many as Eight Seven million of its end users to Cambridge Analytica, a data mining firm affiliated with US President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai recently turns down an invitation to visit Washington DC to testify before the Senate about foreign governments’ manipulation of online services to sway US political elections. His nonattendance disappointed few lawmakers, who resign an empty chair for google Incorporation alongside the Social Media (Twitter & Facebook) executives who appeared before the Senate committee in September.
As per the report, there was a bug in Application Programming Interface (API) of Google plus which weaken the social platform, taking advantage of bug the attackers successfully made access to personal information of users.
The problem of the bug has been sorted out, informed Google.