Following a massive data breach first reported on by The Wall Street Journal , Google announced today that it is shutting down its social network Google+ for consumers.
The company discovered a bug in one of Google+'s People APIs that allowed apps access to data from Google+ profiles that weren’t marked as public. It included static data fields such as name, email, occupation, gender and age. It did not include information from Google+ posts. The bug was patched in March 2018, but Google didn’t inform users at that point. “We made Google+ with privacy in mind and therefore keep this API’s log data for only two weeks,” the company said in a blog post. “That means we cannot confirm which users were impacted by this bug.”
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/oct/08/google-plus-security-breach-wall-street-journal