Google announces privacy changes due to major Google+ leak it didn't announce

Scandals by filtration Big business data is becoming current. If months ago it was Facebook with the Cambridge Analyitca scandal, a few weeks ago they suffered another attack and the security of thousands of users was breached. This is putting the rest of the services on alert that improve your security to avoid attacks.

On this occasion Google has officially announced that Google+ suffered an attack in which private data was leaked y did not report it to the media. Today what they have called has begun Strobe Project, a mega-pack of security measures to protect and shield the privacy of users.

Google and Google+: of not warning of an attack when shielding users

In the long press release in which Google details the measures of its Strobe Project, what happened is realata. This is a leak that affected almost half a million people. It was in March that Google realized that a Google+ API provided third-party developers with the ability to access the private data of the Google+ profile.

That information was not particularly relevant, but it did contain sensitive information such as names, emails, dates of birth, gender, profile photos, occupation, relationship status, and places where they had lived. Regarding the decision of not communicate the leak to the media, it was nothing more than a decision based on the engineers not seeing any evidence of misuse of the compromised data.

Sin embargo, realizamos un análisis detallado durante las dos semanas previas a parchear el error y, a partir de ese análisis, los perfiles de hasta 500,000 cuentas de Google+ se vieron potencialmente afectados. Nuestro análisis mostró que hasta 438 aplicaciones pueden haber utilizado esta API.

Therefore, Google has decided to guide its project in two directions:

• Close Google+ to completely redesign what kind of relationship the APIs should have with the information, and the role that the developer has to have in the social network
• Improve the privacy of your entire structure adding security systems and other measures explained in its official blog.

The closure of Google+ will be approximately one year The intention is to reopen the social network in August 2019. We will see if the great search engine is able to renew certain aspects of its security that have caused a mass leak from which it is not possible to have much information.