Washington DC: Tech giant Google is shutting down its social networking site Google Plus after a technical glitch was found to have compromised accounts and personal information of over 500,000 of its users. The announcement in this regard was made by Ben Smith, Google Fellow and vice-president of engineering, in a blog post. The Wall Street Journal, which was the first to report about it said that a software glitch in the social site gave outside developers potential access to private Google+ profile data between 2015 and March 2018, when internal investigators discovered and fixed the issue.
"A memo reviewed by the Journal prepared by Google's legal and policy staff and shared with senior executives warned that disclosing the incident would likely trigger "immediate regulatory interest" and invite comparisons to Facebook's leak of user information to data firm Cambridge Analytica," the daily reported. Google's Indian-American CEO Sundar Pichai was briefed on the plan to not notify users after an internal committee had reached that decision, The Wall Street Journal said quoting unnamed sources.
Smith announced that Google Plus will not be shut down immediately. "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," he wrote.