Google+ failed to compete with its friends, Facebook and Twitter, as Google had hoped. Now, less than eight years after its launch, it's coming to an end. Google has said that, starting today, content in Google+users' accounts will begin to be deleted.
There are many reasons that could lead to the permanent deactivation of Google+, but, essentially, a coding error with implications for user privacy is the main culprit.
While Facebook has so far overcome its user privacy issues, Google+ did not have the stamina to survive the potential exposure of 52 million of the platform's users' data.
Google itself admits that Google+was a complete failure due to low user engagement and 90% of session times on the service being less than five seconds. But the existence of the bug is ultimately the reason it was finally put to an end.
The coding bug was believed to have been active between 2015 and 2018, leaving profile information, including gender, age, occupation, and more, exposed to third-party developers, even if marked by the user as private.
It was finally discovered and fixed in March 2018, but Google had not officially declared its existence until October.
This should be a lesson to any organization that doesn't care about user privacy and security. While Google acknowledged that "the bug affected approximately 52.5 million users," it also pointed out that there was no indication that any of the hundreds of developers who had access to this user data for six days were actually aware.
According to Ben Smith, a Google partner, the final number of requests that used the incorrect code that potentially granted access to 500,000 Google+ accounts was 438.
If you were a Google+ user, there was plenty of time to save your content and plenty of instructions from Google on how to do so. However, if you managed to lose it all, it may not be too late to access your posts. The Internet Archive has created backups of publicly visible posts for the past few weeks that you can save.
