The demise of Google Plus is being sped up after the company announced that a new bug has been discovered, affecting 52.5 million users.
“We’ve recently determined that some users were impacted by a software update introduced in November that contained a bug affecting a Google+ API,” the Mountain View, California company said in a blog post this week. “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.”
52.5 million users affected in new Google Plus data breach
Google said that it will hasten the social network’s death, “sunsetting” Google Plus in April 2019 rather than August. The shuttering of the platform’s API will occur in the next 90 days, the company said.
The second Google data breach, coming months after a previous one, has reignited concerns about user privacy and security safeguards supposedly in place.
In that incident more than 500,000 Google Plus users had their data exposed this past spring through a third-party application. Instead of disclosing the data breach, Google opted to hide it, according to the Wall Street Journal, who was the first to break the news.
The revelations from the first hack, which leaked users’ email addresses, usernames, ages and more, showed that Google didn’t handle it like they should have. Or as Wired Magazine so artfully put it: “The company found and investigated the flaw internally, rather than from an outside researcher, and opted not to disclose it until the Wall Street Journal report effectively forced them to.”
Do you have Google Plus?
Many of you may be wondering if you even have a Google Plus account. The easiest way to find out is to go inside your Gmail.com account and click on the square grid icon in the top right-hand corner. This is where your Google apps are. You should see a red Google Plus icon, if you’ve configured it.
As of this writing, Google Plus is still up and running for many users, but the company has not said how long that will be the case. The #1 thing users can do is review their privacy settings to make sure they have the basic safeguards in place. Here’s how to do that:
See the apps Google is sharing your data with
Log into your Google account. Go to the upper right-hand corner, where it has your profile pic or the first letter of your Google sign-in. Click on it and there’s a link that says “Privacy.”
That’s where you can see what Google is collecting on you and it gives you the option to change the privacy setting.
Click on “Apps with account access” under Sign-in & security to see what third-party apps have your data. You can click on “Manage Apps” to manage or remove access to apps you no longer interact with or trust.
