Google+ faces another massive data leak

Search engine giant Google is giving up on its social media service Google+ four months in advance than it planned after a leak. The data leak of Google + exposed some of the private details of about 52 million users which included the names, email addresses, ages and occupations. A big bug was found in the software of Google which has become the second found in just two months. The incident has forced Google to abandon the ‘not so successful’ social media service four months earlier than it was planned.

A data of 500,000 users was exposed due to a software bug in October 2018. After that the search engine announced that it would shut down the consumer version of Google+ in August 2019 but the date has now been changed to April 2019. Google in a blog post said that the latest bug left data of 52.5 million people compromised for almost a week between November 7, and November 13, 2018.

The bug had allowed the developers of third party apps to access information even if the user’s profile was not set as private. However, the search engine said that it did not think that hackers used the glitch to steal the data before the company spotted and put a patch. David Thacker, the vice president of project management at Google , wrote in a blog post, “With the discovery of this new bug, we have decided to expedite the shut-down of all Google+ APIs; this will occur within the next 90 days. In addition, we have also decided to accelerate the sunsetting of consumer Google+ from August 2019 to April 2019. While we recognize there are implications for developers, we want to ensure the protection of our users.”

The bug was found by Google as a result of the standard testing practice and said it had started notifying the users who were hit by the bug.

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