Google Plus Has Just Been Shut Down! What Is The Reason Behind It?

Ben Smith, Google Fellow and Vice President of Engineering, announced that they are shutting down Google+ for consumers in an article he published on October 8. What is the reason behind it? Why are they shutting Google+ down? To find the answer, keep reading!

Let’s start with what Google+ is.

Google couldn’t catch up with Facebook and decided to create a social media platform called ’Buzz’. But it lasted only for 6-7 months. Then they came up with the project of ‘’Google Plus’’.

With Google Plus, you can do anything that you could do with Google.  You can check your mails, talk on Gtalk, share your location with your friends using Google Maps and so on.  It was founded in 2011. They reached 10 million users two weeks after the lunch. In September, 2012 they reached 300 million monthly active users and 400 million overall.

Yes it was founded with the purpose of surpassing Facebook but they couldn’t. The number of Google+ users and the amount of time they spend on Google+ started to decrease.

They announced that they are shutting down Google Plus for consumers because they couldn’t reach their goals and the %90 of users spend only 5 seconds on the platform and then leave.  But rumours has it that they are shutting down the platform because of a security bug in Google+ People APIs.

Here is the official explanation about the bug:

Users can grant access to their Profile data, and the public Profile information of their friends, to Google+ apps, via the API.

The bug meant that apps also had access to profile fields that were shared with the user, but not marked as public.

This data is limited to static, optional Google+ Profile fields including name, email address, occupation, gender and age. (See the full list on our developer site.) It does not include any other data you may have posted or connected to Google+ or any other service, like Google+ posts, messages, Google account data, phone numbers or G Suite content.

We discovered and immediately patched this bug in March 2018. We believe it occurred after launch as a result of the API’s interaction with a subsequent Google+ code change.

We made Google+ with privacy in mind and therefore keep this API’s log data for only two weeks. That means we cannot confirm which users were impacted by this bug. However, we ran a detailed analysis over the two weeks prior to patching the bug, and from that analysis, the Profiles of up to 500,000 Google+ accounts were potentially affected. Our analysis showed that up to 438 applications may have used this API.

We found no evidence that any developer was aware of this bug, or abusing the API, and we found no evidence that any Profile data was misused.

Here are the reasons why Google Plus is being shutting down for consumers. For your information; it is still going to be available for businesses.

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