Google+ RIP

Google has officially announced that it is closing its social network Google +

We are shutting down Google+ for consumers.

More specifically, Google said that they decided to disable most of the functions of Google+ for ordinary users and leave the service fully accessible only to corporate customers. This decision puts the final cross on the product, as on the social network. One of the reasons was the low popularity of the service, only 10% of sessions in which last more than five seconds.

Users will have 10 months (until August 201 9 ) to save their data and move to other social networks. Details will be made public later.
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Immediately before the decision to close the general public, the fact of a major security incident on Google+ became known.

The bug in the security mechanisms allowed third-party developers to access Google+ user profile data from 2015, until Google discovered and fixed it in March 2018, but decided not to inform the world about it. When the user gave permission to the application to access data of his public profile, the bug also allowed developers to extract non-public information from the user’s profile and his friends ’profiles.

Data from almost 500 thousand accounts were potentially subject to abuse. However, Google representatives say they have no evidence that the data was misused by 438 applications that could have access. Full names of users, email addresses, dates of birth, gender, profile photos, place of residence, occupation and status of relations were available for parsing.

As measures to prevent future leaks, Google has taken a number of steps as part of the new Project Strobe initiative. The initiative aims to revise the rules for third-party access to Google user accounts and data from Android devices, as well as to rethink the company's philosophy regarding application access to data.

In particular, Google will restrict developers access to data from Android devices and from the Gmail mail service. They will take away permissions to read call logs and SMS, and through the Android Contacts API it will no longer be possible to receive data on the interaction of contacts.