Weeks after announcing it would shut down Google Plus, Google says it will significantly accelerate the platform's shutdown, following news that a bug exposed user data for nearly a week.
Google announced on Monday that it would accelerate the shutdown of Google Plus as well as the platform's API, following an investigation into the intentional exposure of user profile data caused by a bug last month.
David Thacker, Google’s vice president of product management, said the company discovered the bug “as part of our ongoing testing processes and fixed it within a week.” An estimated 52.5 million users were affected by the bug.
“With the discovery of this new bug, we have decided to accelerate the deprecation of all Google+ APIs, which will occur within the next 90 days. Additionally, we have decided to accelerate the end of Google+ for consumers from August to April 2019. While we recognize that there will be impacts for developers, we want to ensure the protection of our users,” Thacker writes.
According to Thacker, no third party compromised their systems in this case and the company has no “evidence” that third-party app developers benefited from the data exposure between November 7 and 13.
The data in question could include users' names, platform activities and other common information, according to the company, but not financial data, passwords or other details that are typically what malicious hackers seek.
In October, Google announced that it would shut down Google+, following a Wall Street Journal and an internal audit that suggested that the data of about 500,000 users had been exposed for nearly three years.
Now, in addition to that, the company has announced the existence of a new bug in a Google+ API, part of the November 7 software update, that exposed user data from 52.5 million accounts.
In his post, Thacker also noted that the company's audits "revealed that a Google+ API was not working as intended" and Google staff "immediately fixed the bug and began investigating the issue.".
The company has begun the process of informing its free and paid users about the change and hopes that it will "give users options to transition from Google+ for consumers.".
