After discovering another software fault in Google+, Google says it would shut down its social media platform in April – four months earlier than it announced.
This error caused a data breach, allowing partner apps to access data like emails, gender and age. However, Google claims that nobody capitalised on this breach. This makes the second fault discovered in a year.
The latest flaw affected 52.5 million Google+ accounts, including some business customers, and lasted six days, Google revealed in a blog post.
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This discovery emanates a day before Sundar Pichai, Google’s Chief Executive was to appear before the U.S. Congress’ House Judiciary Committee on the issue bothering its data collection practices.
Google in August said it would shut down Google+’s consumer version in August 2019, saying it would be too challenging to maintain. They announced that the profile data of about 500,000 users might have been leaked to partner apps by a bug which has been present more than two years.
Apps that depend on Google+ to fetch data to personalize their own services with user authorization will not have access to it over the next 90 days and developing Google+ for business customers would remain a focus, it added.
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