Google says it has expedited the platform closure by 4 months as a result
A newly discovered flaw in Google+ has exposed data belonging to 52.5 million users, even if their account settings were set to private, leading the company to shutter the social media platform earlier than expected.
Google revealed that a bug in a Google+ API, discovered in November, allowed developers to access user data, regardless of their privacy settings, and extract information for use in applications.
Google first discovered the bug in November and patched it within a week, the company revealed in an advisory post on Monday. As a result, Google+ APIs will shut down within the next 90 days, preventing any further app development using the platform, and the closure of the service will be brought forward from August to April 2019.
« We’ve recently determined that some users were impacted by a software update introduced in November that contained a bug affecting a Google+ API, » said David Thacker, VP product management for G Suite. « We discovered this bug as part of our standard and ongoing testing procedures and fixed it within a week of it being introduced.
