Google announced that it is shutting down Google+ for the consumers. As per Google, they are taking this big step because Google+ is not much in use but the actual cause behind the purpose is noted to be something else.
Recently, it has been discovered that a security bug is hampering the privacy of the Google+ users. But Google is not ready to disclose anything about it in public.
The company, a few days back, talked in a blog post that Google+ was launched to come up as a rival to the famous social site Facebook in the year 2011. But the company was not able to achieve the amount of attention that it was seeking. Soon, The Wall Street Journal came up with a report as per which Google is not ready to disclose the security bug that has been affecting the user profiles of Google+.
The company though is not disclosing the bug but has claimed that they have discovered such a bug and have patched it also during March 2018. As per the bug, the app developers were able to access the profiles of the users who have not marked themselves as public. Though it has been noted that as many as 500,000 profiles have got affected by the bug but Google has claimed that there has been no such evidence found about any kind of data misuse.
In the same month, even Facebook suffered by the data scandal of Cambridge Analytica. This raised a huge wave of discussions among various political leaders.
Also, as the report of the Wall Street Journal, the legal department of Google has warned the executives not to disclose the flaw so that they can protect the company’s reputation.
Recently, a spokesperson from Google said on the platform of CNN that they take special care of the privacy of the users and they notify the users about the bugs, whenever found. He also claimed that Google takes steps beyond the requirements to solve the issue, whenever such privacy and data problems are noticed”.
Google has faced such a security issue because it allowed many of the third-party apps to access is Gmail accounts. The same amount privacy focus has been attracted by Facebook also.
As a result, the Cambridge Analytica accessed data from about 87 million users on Facebook without their permission. It was just last month when Facebook announced that it was the information of about 50 million profiles.