After several years of speculation that the Google+ is going to be shut down, Google is finally bringing Google+ for consumers to an end. Following a report from Wall Street Journal related to the Google+ data breach, the Mountain View-based tech giant has decided to shut down its social network platform for customers, over the course of 10 months.
In announcing the closure of the service, the company also admitted that Google+ never received the broad adoption or engagement, with over 90 percent of the user session lasting for less than five seconds. With the security concerns related to the Google+’s API, the company has decided to shut down the platform rather than spending time and money on securing it.
WSJ first reported about the data breach at Google which exposed private data of hundreds of thousands of Google+ users. The report adds that the company decided keep the exposure under wraps fearing scrutiny from regulators. However, the company the breach was discovered and it immediately fixed the issue in March of this year.
The company had 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. The bug was patched in March 2018, but Google didn’t inform users at that point.
In a blog post, Google revealed that nearly 500,000 users may have been impacted, but because it keeps the log data for only two weeks, it can’t fully confirm who was truly impacted and who was not.
While Google+ is shutting down for consumers, it will continue as a product for Enterprise users, which seems as the most popular use of the social network. It will announce new Enterprise-focused products for the platform in the near future.
