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It said a bug in its software meant information that people believed was private had been accessible by third parties.
Google said up to 500,000 users had been affected.
Google is about to have its Cambridge Analytica moment. A security bug allowed third-party developers to access Google+ user profile data since 2015 until Google discovered and patched it in March, but decided not to inform the world. When a user gave permission to an app to access their public profile data, the bug also let those developers pull their and their friends’ non-public profile fields. Indeed, 496,951 users’ full names, email addresses, birth dates, gender, profile photos, places lived, occupation and relationship status were potentially exposed, though Google says it has no evidence the data was misused by the 438 apps that could have had access.
[edited by: Brett_Tabke at 8:10 pm (utc) on Oct 8, 2018]
[edit reason] added quotes [/edit]
Where did you read about the closure of Google+?
Project Strobe: Protecting your data, improving our third-party APIs, and sunsetting consumer Google+
...
Finding 1: There are significant challenges in creating and maintaining a successful Google+ product that meets consumers’ expectations.
Action 1: We are shutting down Google+ for consumers.
...
We are shutting down Google+ for consumers.
[edited by: keyplyr at 8:39 am (utc) on Oct 9, 2018]
May be Google found other issues
Finding 1: There are significant challenges in creating and maintaining a successful Google+ product that meets consumers’ expectations.
All those "automatically added to G+" accounts that weren't being used were purged a couple months ago. So it seems the platform may have been considered chopping-block material for some time.
