When it rains, it pours and the most popular search engine on the planet is having to explain once more the embarrassing detail of a security breach to its social media platform Google Plus.
In October, Google disclosed that a bug had affected ‘hundreds of thousands’ of users on Google Plus between 2015 and March 2018.
Now, with barely two months after the initial revelations, the numbers have increased significantly, affecting a larger proportion of Google Plus users within a shorter period of time.
On December 3, Google wrote in a blogpost that an update to its platform in November carried a bug that rendered private information of 52.5 million users accessible to software developers.
“We discovered this bug as part of our standard and ongoing testing procedures and fixed it within a week of it being introduced,” Google said.
The bug affected a Google Plus API, which is the application programming interface, a term which basically refers to the building blocks that allow software developers to make apps.
READ : WHY GOOGLE PLUS IS SHUTTING DOWN
For six days, private information relating to the profile of account users was accessible to software developers, Google said.
The firm said, “With respect to this API, apps that requested permission to view profile information that a user had added to their Google+ profile—like their name, email address, occupation, age … were granted permission to view profile information about that user even when set to not-public.”
However, the bug did not give developers access to information such as financial data, national identification numbers, passwords, or similar data typically used for fraud or identity theft, Google said.
“No third party compromised our systems, and we have no evidence that the developers who inadvertently had this access for six days were aware of it or misused it in any way,” Google added.
The company said that it was continuing investigations to further identify how the bug affected users, and as a response was going to shut down all Google Plus APIs within 90 days.
At the same time, Google said it was bringing forward its intended closure of Google Plus. “We have also decided to accelerate sunsetting consumer Google+, bringing it forward from August 2019 to April 2019.”
Google also reiterated what it had announced in October as the reasons for shutting down Google Plus, chiefly the significant challenges involved in maintaining a successful product that meets consumers’ expectations as well as the platform’s low usage.
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