Google is going to shut down its social media network Google plus, after suffering a disaster of a data breach exposing the information of a few thousand who used the network.
According to the Crunch.com, a security bug allowed third-party developers to access user profile data since 2015 until discovered by Google in March of 2018 and attempted to patch it up in secret.
“ I feel betrayed that Google did not inform us about being hacked because Google is so trusted. I figured they had to hide this because I was unaware.” A VWU student said. The Wall Street Journal reported that the company sat on the bug for months from the fear of drawing regulatory scrutiny.
This bug allowed third party apps to pull profile fields from indeed, 446,951 users full names,emails addresses, birth dates,gender, profile photos, places lived, occupations and relationship status according to techcrunch.com. When asking Google about this breach Google says it has no evidence the data was misused by apps that could have had access. “ I don’t feel any kind of way about Google plus being hacked. I feel as if I’m duct taped and it’s out of my control. But it’s scary that these accounts are getting closer to home from facebook to Google[search] unfortunately I use both.” – Senior Caimaya Ashton said
Through Google has not gotten into details about the easily hacked network, it seems to have a familiar nature of flaws like Facebook.
After admitting the security breach, Google announced that the company is doing away with the social media network, admitting that the network failed to gain broad adoption. In other words no used the app, if not knowing about it at all.
“I don’t know what Google plus is, but I think it has something to do with Google” Senior Alexis Conway said. According to Google, the network currently has low usage and engagement, 90% of Google plus user sessions are less than 5 seconds.
In response to this embarrassing news Google has decided to shut down the social networking site by August of 2019.
The company will now focus its attention on a more fine grained control over what the world famous search engine will share.
Ashllee Spurlock
adspurlock@vwu.edu
