Google+ API vulnerability is finally admitted, network shutdown sped up

Google+, the longtime also-ran social media network, is closing before its initially promised August deadline.

In October, The Wall Street Journal had reported that a vulnerability in its developer APIs had allowed third-party apps to obtain personal details such as date of birth, email address and employer. Subsequently, Google announced for its own reasons — low usership or otherwise — that it would close in 10 months.

Today, Google has once again commented on its The Keyword blog, saying that it had found an API bug — the very bug the Journal was told about from sources — only last month. The bug had an estimated impact on 52.5 million accounts, but the company said it was confident that data was not abused.

The company patched the security hole within a week of its discovery. Since then, it has also decided to expedite the sunsetting of Google+ APIs, resulting in the consumer version of Google+’s shutdown coming in April 2019.

Google has consistently maintained that Google+ for enterprise would go on operating and that customers would be notified of who in their organization is affected by the bug.

Google is also due to shut down its Allo consumer chat app and the legacy version of Hangouts in favor of alternative solutions.

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Google+ will shut down after WSJ revealed private data exposure

The data breach allowed app developers to collect data from not only consenting users, but those who shared private data with those users.

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Gamer IDs come to Google Play Games: your new identity for Android gaming

Social networking: it ain’t for everyone. Or maybe it is for you, but you’ve already found the network you like to call home, and you’d rather not be bothered keeping up with every competitor popping their head up like an inquisitive prairie dog. Google+ has found itself the target of a lot of that too-many-networks resentment, especially as users interpreted a number of Google’s actions as trying to force Google+ upon them – like it or not. To the company’s credit, it’s been easing up on such practices recently, and

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Google+ scores an Android app update focused on faster and safer browsing

Google isn’t ready to throw in the towel just yet in a seemingly losing social network battle against heavyweight champion Facebook, somewhat surprisingly holding the advantage over Twitter in active user numbers and constantly improving the G Plus UI.To be fair, constant might be a bit of an understatement, as at least on ...

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Google’s new People API streamlines how apps can gather contact data

Whether we’re interacting with a new social network, organizing a get-together, or just sending out some old-fashioned emails, there are a lot of good reasons for an app to tap into our ever-growing list of personal contacts. Between info we gather ourselves, and stuff that can be pulled from online sources, our phones have access to a lot of data about our friends, relatives, and co-workers. On Android so far, giving apps access to all this stuff has been a bit of a hodgepodge of API ...

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Google Play Games sign-in and permissions process easing up

Play a lot of games on your Android phone? You’re probably in it to win it and that means getting onto the scoreboards. You’re probably familiar with signing into Play Games every time you open up a game. Well, since Google’s been reforming its permissions processing on Android Marshmallow and the

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Latest Google+ Android update fixes bugs and accessibility issues, hides bottom tab bar

It’s not unusual for Google to simultaneously improve or refine several of its software products, with recent GMaps, Cardboard and Google Now Launcher updates shortly followed by a minor but noticeable G Plus Android makeover.The social network, which remains a tier 2 Facebook rival despite continuous efforts from the search giant to better its ...

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Google has so far removed 440K+ search results on ‘right to be forgotten’ grounds

In addition to being a delicate, polarizing issue that the world’s largest provider of online search services is still fighting in courts around the old continent, the right to be forgotten concept put into practice by the European Union last year apparently requires a lot of time and resources spent by Google.And we mean a lot, with a grand total of 348,508 claims filed since May 2014, concerning more than 1.2 million URLs, of which the now Alphabet-owned search giant only removed 42 percent. That’s a ...

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Google brings new look to Google+ with “drastically simplified” layout

Google’s social network has never been an easy sell. The company launched it at a time when Facebook was already an unstoppable juggernaut, and many users questioned the need for another social outlet. Then there were those who pushed back against Google’s efforts to tie Google+ to the company’s other products, as if it were leveraging their own popularity to force users to interact with a social network they didn’t explicitly want. But over the years we’ve seen Google’s approach to ...

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This week’s Google app-update Wednesday is a big one

We’re no stranger to Google updating its software on Wednesdays, and each week we look forward to news of a few apps picking up a tweak, bugfix, or new feature here and there. While normally that means a handful of apps being tapped for updates, this week’s lineup is a bit larger than most, with at least a dozen Android apps seeing updates headed their way today.This isn’t necessarily an exhaustive list, but new updates are available today for Blogger, Chrome (as well as Chrome Beta), ...

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Google+ redesign arrives as latest update heads out

Google’s long-term goals for Google+ and how it ties in with the rest of the company’s software and services may still be up in the air (and Google itself isn’t doing much to prevent such speculation), but as far as the present is concerned, we’ve been expecting a pretty decent UI refresh to come to the Google+ Android app, as featured in a leak that surfaced last month. Today we ...

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Google inadvertently throws some fuel on that “rumored death of Google+” fire

A bit under a month ago, we shared with you a pretty controversial rumor, suggesting that Google could be thinking about making some major changes to Google+ concerning the role the social network would hold in the company’s broader strategy. Specifically, we heard that Google might downplay the extent to which Google+ and all its social interactions would be pushed upon users, and it might instead evolve into something more like a universal sign-in; really, a lot like Google accounts before Google+ came around in the first ...

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Pocketnow Weekly 093: NEVER SETTLE

The “flagship killer” that demands that you “NEVER SETTLE” breaks cover. The pioneer of the modern mobile browser shares his story. And at long last, Microsoft and Nokia finally consummate their love. We could have a feature segment, but with news this hot, do we really need one? Not with a guest like Stefan Constantinescu of TabDump to bring some flavor (and profanity) to the proceedings, that’s for sure. A word on the language of this episode: we’ve recently ditched the “Clean” content rating that’s been with us from the start of ...

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Maybe we should be worried about the fate of Google+ after all

Yesterday brought the unexpected news that Google’s Vic Gundotra was leaving the company. Gundotra had been one of the key figures behind Google+, so we wondered what his departure might mean for the fate of the service and its integration with everything else under Google’s umbrella. News that Google would promote a new Google+ head from within the existing team had us assuming that things would be business as usual, even in Gundotra’s absence, but ...

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