Google Shutting Down Google+ Following Privacy Breach

Google+, we hardly knew ye. 

In a blog post published Monday morning, Google said the company was shutting down its social network, adding yet another product to the pile of failed Google experiments (Buzz, Answers, Notebook, Wave, etc etc). 

The company wrote they were 'sunsetting' the social media service because of its small and 'unengaged' user base, as well as because of a privacy breach last March that affected up to 500,000 users on the network. 

According to the blog post, the company discovered a security vulnerability in March that allowed third-party apps to access personal details the user had marked as private. Some of the data leaked by the breach included a user's name, work experience, birth date, email address and where the user had lived. 

According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, Google did not release information about the breach because they wanted to avoid scrutiny by Congress and damage to the company's reputation. 

A memo prepared by Google's legal and policy staff appeared to warn against releasing news of the bug, saying it would create "immediate regulatory interest" and draw comparisons to Facebook's own Cambridge Analytica data scandal.

Google says about 90% of Google+ users used the site for an average of only five seconds. 

Given these challenges and the very low usage of the consumer version of Google+, we decided to sunset the consumer version of Google+.

To give people a full opportunity to transition, we will implement this wind-down over a 10-month period, slated for completion by the end of next August. Over the coming months, we will provide consumers with additional information, including ways they can download and migrate their data.

Consumers still have another nine months of Google+ to download their personal data before it goes away forever. Enterprise users of Google+ will be able to access their profile indefinitely, the company said.

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