Google+ announces closure and reports 500,000 user accounts exposure

Alphabet, parent company to which Google belongs, has announced the gradual closure of its social network Google+ over the next ten months and has also revealed a vulnerability in the service that would have exposed users' personal data.

The vulnerability, discovered as part of an internal audit called Project Strobe that analyses the security and privacy of its products and services, revealed the exposure of personal data of up to 500,000 users between 2015 and March 2018. Google has indicated that it has no evidence that this failure was used to extract private information.

The error was in the API part of Google+ for developers, and allowed third-party apps to access profile fields that were shared with the user, but were not marked as public (name, birthday, genre, profile picture...).