Google Announced Google+ Shut down, Following Security Breach That Exposed 500,000 Users Accounts

Google announced Google+ shut down following the security breach that exposed 500,000 Google+ accounts.

The bug allows third-party developers to access user’s name, email address, occupation, gender, and age. According to WSJ Google discovered the bug in March 2018 and they did not disclose the bug.

Google+ Shut down

In a blog post the tech giant said we are storing API log data only for two weeks, so we are unable to confirm which users were impacted by this bug.

However, we have run a detailed analysis based on the API before patching, according to the analysis report more than 500,000 Google+ accounts were impacted and 438 applications used the API.

The company said We have 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.

Google has not revealed any technical details about the vulnerability, the vulnerability appears to be from open from 2015 and it was discovered and fixed by Google in March 2018.

Granular Google Account Permissions

Google announced granular account permissions that shows users more details of what account selected to share with the app.

Instead of seeing all requested permissions in a single screen, apps will have to show you each requested permission, one at a time, within its own dialog box.

Google also to update their User Data Policy for the consumer Gmail API to limit the apps that seeking permission to access your consumer Gmail data and to limit the Google Play to limit which apps are allowed to access a user’s phone and SMS data.

“In the coming months, we’ll roll out additional controls and update policies across more of our APIs. As we do so, we’ll work with our developer partners to give them appropriate time to adjust and update their apps and services.”

The consumer version of Google+ will be fully shut down in the next 10 months, the consumer version of Google+ launched in 2011 and it has not achieved a broad consumer or developer adoption and has only a limited user interaction.

Google says “the consumer version of Google+ currently has low usage and engagement: 90 percent of Google+ user sessions are less than five seconds.”

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