Google is shutting down its social network known as Google+, the news coming shortly after The Wall Street Journal reported that Google had chosen not to disclose a security bug.
A flaw was discovered in March that exposed personal information of up to 500,000 people.
The announcement came in a blog post, which was also Google’s first public description of the privacy bug.
The Wall Street Journal, citing anonymous individuals, reports that Google deliberately avoided disclosing the problem at the time, in part to avoid drawing regulatory scrutiny.
The Google+ flaw could have allowed 438 external apps to scoop up user names, email addresses, occupations, gender and age without authorization.
The company says it didn’t find any evidence that any of the affected personal information was misused. It says that’s one reason it delayed disclosing the problem
“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+,” Google said in the blog announcement.
“To give people a full opportunity to transition, we will implement this wind-down over a 10-month period, slated for completion by the end of next August. Over the coming months, we will provide consumers with additional information, including ways they can download and migrate their data.”
