Google announces new security flaw in Google Plus, closes social network early
Google announces new security flaw, closes social network
early
Google Plus received its initial kiss of death in early
October, when the company revealed that a security bug had exposed the
information of 500,000 users.
By Jillian D’Onfro Dec. 10, 2018 12:30 PM PST
Google is shutting down its beleaguered social network
sooner than expected in the wake of a new security issue that affected 52.5
million users.
Google Plus received its initial kiss of death in early
October, when the company revealed that a security bug had exposed the account
information of 500,000 users, including their names, email addresses and
occupations. At the time, Google planned to shut down the social network by
August 2019.
But in a blog post Monday Google wrote that it discovered
a second bug that allowed the profile information of 52.5 million users to be
viewable by developers, even if it was set to private, using one of Google’s
application programming interfaces, or APIs, for six days in November. Once
again, the available data included information like users’ names, email
addresses, occupations and ages.
Google said that the bug did not give third-party apps
access to users’ financial data or passwords and that it didn’t find any
evidence that the private profile information was accessed or misused. However,
it now plans to shut down Google Plus by April 2019, and access to its APIs in
the next 90 days.
Google’s initial security bug raised hackles in
Washington and with the general public because The Wall Street Journal reported
at the time that Google didn’t disclose it for months because it feared
regulatory scrutiny and reputational damage.
Monday’s disclosure comes a day before Google CEO Sundar
Pichai is set to testify before Congress about transparency and accountability.
“We understand that our ability to build reliable
products that protect your data drives user trust,” Google’s blog post said.
“We have always taken this seriously, and we continue to
invest in our privacy programs to refine internal privacy review processes,
create powerful data controls, and engage with users, researchers, and
policymakers to get their feedback and improve our programs.”
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