Google Plus is shutting down after massive data exposure of 500K accounts

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Business Standard: Tech giant Google is shutting down its social networking site Google Plus after a technical glitch was found to have compromised accounts and personal information of over 500,000 of its users. The announcement in this regard was made by Ben Smith, Google Fellow and vice-president of engineering, in a blog post Monday, in which he noted that the Indian-American headed company could not confirm which users were impacted by the bug.

"However, we ran a detailed analysis over the two weeks prior to patching the bug, and from that analysis, the profiles of up to 500,000 Google+ accounts were potentially affected. Our analysis showed that up to 438 applications may have used this API," he said."We found no evidence that any developer was aware of this bug, or abusing the API, and we found no evidence that any profile data was misused," Smith said. The technical bug was detected as part of an effort called Project Strobe started by Google early this year. It is a root-and-branch review of third-party developer access to Google accounts and Android device data and of our philosophy around apps' data access, he wrote.

"This project looked at the operation of our privacy controls, platforms where users were not engaging with our APIs because of concerns around data privacy, areas where developers may have been granted overly broad access, and other areas in which our policies should be tightened," Smith said. BS