Google is having a tough time in protecting the personal information of users on its Plus service, forcing the company to speed up its plan of shutting down Google Plus.
Last month, a security flaw was discovered which accidently exposed the names, email addresses, ages, occupation and other personal information of 52.5 million Google Plus users. It also causes apps to access profile data that was shared with a specific user but not publicly.
The company revealed the latest privacy lapse in a blog post on Monday. This time Google says that the leak was discovered by their team and it was active for just six days, i.e. from November 7th and November 13th.
This marks the second incident within two months where Google admitted the existence of bugs which enabled unauthorized access to Google Plus profiles.
To recall, the company acknowledged finding a privacy flaw in October which affected 500,000 Plus users. Not to mention the fact that Google waited for more than six months to reveal this to the public.
With the discovery of the latest bug, the shutdown has been preponed from August to April next year. Moreover, API access to the network will be shut down within the next 90 days.
According to Google the bug was discovered during its standard testing procedure and claims that there is “no evidence that the app developers that inadvertently had this access for six days were aware of it or misused.”
Meanwhile, Google has started notifying users and enterprise customers who were affected by the bug.
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