Google To Accelerate Sunsetting of Consumer Google+ After Bug Discovered in November
11 December 2018 - 6:06AM
Dow Jones News
By Michael Dabaie
Alphabet Inc.'s (GOOGL) Google said Monday it would accelerate
the sunsetting of consumer Google+ and expedite the shut-down of
all Google+ application programming interfaces after discovering a
bug that potentially exposed some user information in November.
The bug didn't give developers access to information such as
financial data, national identification numbers, passwords, or
similar data typically used for fraud or identity theft, Google
said.
Google in October said it would sunset the consumer version of
social network Google+ and its APIs.
The company said it determined that some users were affected by
a software update introduced in November that contained a bug
affecting a Google+ API.
Google said it will shut-down all Google+ APIs within the next
90 days accelerate the sunsetting of consumer Google+ from August
2019 to April 2019.
The company said that the bug affected 52.5 million users in
connection with a Google+ API. Apps that requested permission to
view profile information that a user had added to their Google+
profile, such as their name, email address, occupation and age,
were granted permission to view profile information about that user
even when set to not-public.
In addition, apps with access to a user's Google+ profile data
also had access to the profile data that had been shared with the
consenting user by another Google+ user but that wasn't shared
publicly.
Google said it discovered the bug as part of standard testing
procedures and fixed it within a week of it being introduced. "No
third party compromised our systems, and we have no evidence that
the app developers that inadvertently had this access for six days
were aware of it or misused it in any way," the company said in a
blog post.
The post can be found here:
https://www.blog.google/technology/safety-security/expediting-changes-google-plus/
Write to Michael Dabaie at michael.dabaie@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
December 10, 2018 13:51 ET (18:51 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2018 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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