Google+ has announced that it is advancing the shutting down of its service from April 2019 itself and not waiting till August, as earlier announced. The decision follows another breach of its data and this time around 52.5 million account holders could find themselves in trouble as their personal data stand compromised on the platform.
This is the second time this is happening with Google+ this year. In the earlier reported incident too, partner apps were found to be the culprits. These apps are reported to have had access to the data belonging to the account holders in Google+, primarily due to a snag in the software. Details like the name, email, gender and age of these customers would have been available to them for access. All these have been shared by Google itself through its official blog.
This report could add fodder to the lawmakers on Capitol Hill who are expected to grill Google CEO Sundar Pichai on Tuesday. The House Judiciary Committee has summoned Pichai to know more about Google’s policies on collecting personal information and their further safekeeping and usage. Already there is clamour for enacting laws in the US also, much like the GDPR that Europe is busy implementing.
It may be recalled that it was only in October that the company had informed of its plans to shut down the Google + platform and almost a one-year window till August 2019 was being allowed for the account holders to migrate to other services. At that time, Google shocked everyone by saying that the personal data of some 500,000 users lay open to hackers for over two years thanks to one of the partner apps. Now this figure of compromised accounts stands at 100 times more than that number.
Google is trying to put in place a mechanism that could stop this practice of other apps pulling data from the main app for their own use.