Google+ is shutting down after a huge data breach
Google announced earlier this week (8 October), that its social networking site, Google+, is going to be shutting down, for consumers, soon.
The closure comes because, first reported by The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), there was a bug in one of Google+'s People APIs. This meant that apps had access to data from profiles on Google+ that were not marked as public. Data that could be accessed included: names, email addresses, profession, age and gender. No information from posts on Google's social network could not be accessed.
It's not surprising that Google's now chosen this time to shut the + network. It didn't have near as enough activity against other social networking sites such as Facebook. We've been having a discussion in the office and near enough everyone cannot remember when we last logged onto, or looked at posts on Google+.
As said in a blog post on Google's official blog, it appears that 90% of Google+ user sessions last for less than five seconds. That's not a lot at all and are surely figures that Google are disappointed about.
It turns out the worrying data leak but was fixed back in March of this year, however, Google chose to keep this under-wraps and didn't inform users. Google's stated in a post: "...We cannot confirm which users were impacted by this bug." And they've also said: "We made Google+ with privacy in mind and therefore keep this API's log data for only two weeks."
Google+ is however sticking around for Enterprise users (businesses). New Google+ Enterprise products and tools will be announced by Google in the near future.
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