A little while ago, it was disclosed that Google’s Google+ service had some serious vulnerabilities that would lead to the service shutting down. At the time I called it a fiasco, but now that fiasco has gotten worse as it has been disclosed that 52.5 million have been affected by another vulnerability:
According to Google, the new vulnerability impacted 52.5 million users, who could have had profile information like their name, email address, occupation, and age exposed to developers, even if their account was set to private. Apps could also access profile data that had been shared with a specific user, but was not shared publicly.
And as a result of this latest screw up, Google is taking this action:
“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,” reads the blog post, penned by David Thacker, Google’s vice president of project management. “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.”
That’s four months early. That gives me the impression that they can’t fix what’s wrong with Google+. Which is likely okay as not a whole lot of people were using the service. But it highlights the fact that Google needs to pay a price for this. And seeing as Google is in front of congress this week, that may actually happen.