Google social media Google Plus is shutting down; the online giant has declared after a bug has been discovered to have exposed people’s private details.
Google is shutting down its long-shunned Plus social media for customers after its disclosure of a defect found in March that might have exposed some private information of up to 500,000 people.
The statement came in a Monday blog post that marked Google’s first public description of the bug.
Google deliberately avoided disclosing the issue at the moment, as a way to avoid drawing regulatory scrutiny and damaging its reputation, according to a Wall Street Journal story that mentioned anonymous documents and individuals.
The US company declined to comment on the Journal’s report and failed to adequately clarify in its blog article why it held off on showing the bug until Monday.
The company didn’t find any evidence that any of their private information affected by the Plus breach was misused.
The timeline laid out by Google suggests that the company found the privacy lapse about precisely the same period Facebook was under fire for a bug in its more popular social media.
Facebooks’ breakdown exposed the personal information of as many as 87 million of its users to Cambridge Analytica, a data-mining firm affiliated with President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign.
Launched in 2011, Google Plus was supposed to be a challenger to Facebook, which currently has over two billion users.
But, Plus flopped and quickly become a digital ghost city, prompting Google to begin de-emphasising it several years back.