Google recently announced it would shut down its social networking site Google+ due to low use and multiple bugs reported on the platform in March 2017. The bug resulted in a leak of millions of user’s data.
“The consumer version of Google+ currently has low usage and engagement: 90 per cent of Google+ user sessions are less than five seconds,” said Google, which is headquartered in Mountain View in northern California, Xinhua reported.
The death of Google+ also came as a consequence of a bug found last year but admitted for the first time by Google on Monday, and the defect in one of its Google+ “People APIs” revealed users’ data including information on professions, age, gender, and email addresses of many users.
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“We discovered and immediately patched this bug in March 2018,” Google said, but the flaw, which has existed since 2015, could potentially affect up to 500,000 Google+ accounts.
“Our analysis showed that up to 438 applications might have used this API,” Google said. However, “We found 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.”
The Google+ issue came months after the infamous privacy leakage scandal of the world’s largest social media network Facebook, which has been widely criticised for its failure to protect its users’ private data.