Google has announced that private data of more than 52.5 million Google Plus users was accessible to apps and developers due to a bug in the programming interface (API). The bug was introduced with an update to the social network that was applied in November.
A week after the update was applied, Google found and fixed the issue. Through the bug, apps could make requests for profile data of users that shouldn't have been public. Besides that, the bug also allowed apps to access content that users shared with each other but hadn't made public. According to Google, no apps or developers actually accessed or abused the data. Google will inform all affected users.
It's not the first time that data from Google Plus was leaked. In October, it became known that Google didn't report another data leak in its social network that affected 500,000 users. Because of this leak, Google decided to shut down Google Plus for end users in August 2019. Because of the new data leak, the company has decided to advance this date to April 2019.
The company has also decided to shut down all programming interfaces within the next 90 days.
