Google+ is a social media platform Google launched in 2011. In October 2018 the company announced it will shut down its consumer-facing services. As the second large data breach in two months, this information has served to expedite the shutdown of Google’s social platform. You can read Google’s response to their breach of information here.
The Google+ shutdown was initially prompted by a decline in active users and the first data breach in October of this year. In that breach, Google+ sat on a privacy flaw affecting 500,000 users for six months. Though Google found out about this exposure in March, the company only went public with the information in October.
What was taken this time?
Names, email addresses, occupation, and age. Read the full range of available data here. A November software update produced a bug that made a Google+ AP release the sensitive profile information listed. The information was available to application developers for 6 days but according to Google, no financial data, passwords, or national ID numbers were exposed.
Google will notify consumer users and enterprise customers exposed by this breach. The company will also launch an investigation into this incident to confirm the update didn’t impact other Google+ APIs.
Google has evolved from past mistakes by addressing this issue early on their blog an they are promising to shut down the consumer side of Google+ within 90 days.
Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai is scheduled to appear before a House Committee today, this no doubt accelerated their response.