I’m a little surprised there was anything left on Google Plus to be made vulnerable.
Earlier in the week, Google announced in a blog post that their chopping block-destined social media platform, Google Plus, had suffered yet another data breach. 52.5 million users, even those who had their profiles set to private, were open and visible to anyone who had a set of developer credentials for a few days in November. The vulnerable data includes names, email addresses, jobs, and ages. Thankfully, as far as Google can tell, sensitive information like passwords and financial data were not accessible. Regardless, the writing on the wall is clear: Google Plus needs to hit the bricks sooner rather than later.
After the previous data breach back in October, Google planned to completely end the service as of August 2019. Thanks to this new gaff, however, the timetable has been moved up. Google Plus will be completely ending service in April of 2019. All access to the platform’s APIs will also be suspended within the next three months.
Google attempted to soothe fears in the aforementioned blog post. “We have always taken this seriously, and we continue to invest in our privacy programs to refine internal privacy review processes, create powerful data controls, and engage with users, researchers, and policymakers to get their feedback and improve our programs.”
