Oops.
Google has now admitted that Google Plus has suffered another security failure, allowing the personal information of 52 million users to be accessed by third-party apps and developers without permission.
So, even if you had your profile information – such as your name, email addresss, occupation, etc etc – set as “not-public”, the information could be accessed by unauthorized parties.
According to Google, the flaw was introduced through a software update in November and was spotted less than a week later. The search giant says that it has seen no evidence that any app developers were aware of the flaw or misused it.
“With the discovery of this new bug, we have decided to expedite the shut-down of all Google+ APIs; this will occur within the next 90 days. In addition, we have also decided to accelerate the sunsetting of consumer Google+ from August 2019 to April 2019,” a contrite David Thacker wrote.