Google shutting down social network after data leak

MANILA, Philippines — Technology giant Google will shut down its social networking service Google+ following a data leak that has affected some 500,000 users.

Google fellow and vice president of engineering Ben Smith said the company will shut down Google+ to consumers due to privacy challenges and low usage.

He said a recent audit of its services revealed a bug that compromised some of the data of users of the social networking site.

Smith said the affected data are limited to static, optional Google+ profile fields such as name, email address, occupation, gender and age, and does not include any other data that may have been posted or connected to Google+ or any other service.

“We discovered and immediately patched this bug in March 2018,” he said.

“We cannot confirm which users were impacted by this 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,” he added.

Smith said they found no evidence that any developer was aware of the bug or that any profile data were misused.

“Our Privacy and Data Protection Office reviewed this issue, looking at the type of data involved, whether we could accurately identify the users to inform, whether there was any evidence of misuse and whether there were any actions a developer or user could take in response. None of these thresholds were met in this instance,” the Google executive said.

“The review did highlight the significant challenges in creating and maintaining a successful Google+ that meets consumers’ expectations. Given these challenges and the very low usage of the consumer version of Google+, we decided to sunset the consumer version of Google+,” he added.

Smith said they would wind down operations of Google+ within the next 10 months to give users an opportunity to transition.

While the service would no longer be available to consumers by August next year, Google said it would roll out new features to the service, which may still be used by businesses.

“Our review showed that Google+ is better suited as an enterprise product where co-workers can engage in internal discussions on a secure corporate social network,” Smith said.

“Enterprise customers can set common access rules, and use central controls, for their entire organization. We’ve decided to focus on our enterprise efforts and will be launching new features purpose-built for businesses,” he added.