Say Bye to Google Plus

The data privacy issue has become a reason for a headache for the tech companies one after another in last one year. Now the issue has bound Google, which also has announced the closure of its social network platform Google Plus.

On Monday Google declared that it is shutting down its ailing social network platform Google Plus for its consumers, after a new scrutiny of the company has found that Google has failed to disclose a security bug publicly, which has affected hundreds of thousands of accounts on the service.

Google in a blog post has admitted that Google Plus has failed to achieve “broad consumer or developer adoption” since it was launched as a rival to Facebook in the year 2011. But earlier reports in the media suggest that Google had previously thought not to disclose about a bug that is affecting Google Plus users, may be in order to avoid additional regulatory scrutiny.

In its declaration through the blog post, Google has said, that it had “discovered and immediately patched” a bug in March 2018. The bug potentially allowed app developers to access profile data from users that had not been marked as public. It is said to have affected as many as 500,000 accounts, though Google has said, that it didn’t found any evidence of data misuse.

March 2018, when Google discovered the bug was also the time when Cambridge Analytica data scandal came to light involving Social Media giant Facebook.

Cambridge Analytica was a data firm with strong ties and was hired during President Donald Trump’s election campaign and which has accessed information from 87 million Facebook users without their knowledge. Last month Facebook has disclosed that attackers have exposed information of nearly 50 million Facebook users.

Meanwhile, Google’s legal and policy team has already instructed its senior executives at the company headquarter that is disclosing the security flaw may lead to “immediate regulatory interest”. A spokesperson on behalf of Google has said, “Every year, we send millions of notifications to users about privacy and security bugs and issues. Whenever user data may have been affected, we go beyond our legal requirements and apply several criteria focused on our users in determining whether to provide notice”.

Though in recent months several scrutiny issues have come up involving the tech giants Google and Facebook for allowing third-party access and share data of their users. Now amidst all this uproar, digital and technical experts are trying to find out the intensity of the effect, they have caused to the general users.