The end of Google+ is near. Google's attempt to create a social network to compete with Facebook and Twitter never quite met with the success it wanted. However, as of April 2nd of this year, your Google+ account will cease to exist.
If you are wondering how to download all your Google+ data, there is a very simple method that you can follow. First, you need to head to your Gmail account and click on your profile picture in the top right corner. There you will see “Google+ Profile”. Clicking on the profile will take you to your respective page. Here, in the menu bar on the left of the screen, click on Settings. This will open a page with several options. Scroll down and you will see the option “Delete profile”. The next page will give you some additional information about how deleting the profile may or may not affect other Google services that you may be using. Here you can confirm by checking the boxes at the bottom of the page and clicking on Delete.”
The upcoming shutdown of Google+ has nothing to do with your Google account as a whole or your data in Gmail, Google Photos, and Google Drive.
The company confirmed late last year that its Google+ People APIs had a bug that potentially gave third-party developers unauthorized access to some users’ personal data between 2015 and March 2018. An internal security review called Project Strobe discovered the bug in March of this year, around the same time Facebook was facing intense criticism for revealing that millions of users’ data had been compromised by Cambridge Analytica without their consent. That’s when the process of fixing Google+ began. “We found no evidence that any developers were aware of this bug or abused the API, and we found no evidence that any profile data was used,” said Ben Smith, a Google partner and vice president of engineering.
The Google+ bug is believed to have affected up to 5,00,000 user accounts. Google continues to emphasize that only data from fields such as name, email address, occupation, gender, and age was potentially exposed and continues to emphasize that no third-party developers discovered this vulnerability.
