80°
Baton Rouge, Louisiana
7 Day Forecast
Follow our weather team on social media

Google Plus to close after bug leaks personal information

4 years 5 months 3 weeks ago Monday, October 08 2018 Oct 8, 2018 October 08, 2018 2:49 PM October 08, 2018 in News
Source: Associated Press

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Google is shutting down its underwhelming Plus social network for regular users, following its disclosure of a flaw discovered in March that exposed personal information of up to 500,000 people.

The announcement came in a Monday 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 Plus flaw could have allowed 438 external apps to scoop up usernames, 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.

More News

Desktop News

Click to open Continuous News in a sidebar that updates in real-time.
Radar
7 Days