Google To Shutdown Google Plus After Data Leak

Google announced recently that they’d be drawing the curtain on Google Plus – the search giant’s shot at social networking.  The decision to shut down the social platform came after Google discovered a security breach that exposed the private data of up to 500,000 users. Google+ was launched in June 2011 to enable people share things online. Google+ introduced the concept of Circles: where you could organize your online friends into groups and control who can see your posts. A lot of techies also found a home in Google Plus and are already mourning its demise. In a blog post about the shutdown, Google wrote that up to 438 different third-party applications may have had access to private information due to the bug. Shortly after the story was published, Google announced that it will shut down consumer access to Google+ and improve privacy protections for third-party applications. The search giant also explained that Google+ currently has “low usage and engagement”, and that 90 percent of Google+ user sessions last less than five seconds. However, Google still plans to keep the service alive for enterprise customers who use it to facilitate conversation among co-workers. New features will be rolled out for such users, but the consumer version of Google Plus will be killed off. The final shut down of Google Plus will happen around August 2019. Google also announced new changes to its privacy terms for other Google services. Its latest API changes will limit developers’ access to data on Android devices and Gmail. Developers will no longer receive call log and SMS permissions on Android devices and contact interaction data won’t be available through the Android Contacts API.

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This article was first published on 15th October 2018

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