Con te partirò , Google+
It’s been truly a fun ride, from private testing to the public launch. great hopes for Google+ as an alternative to other mainstream social media options. Campaigning to get friends and family over to the social network, but getting traction against those other platforms was next to impossible.
This all comes to a head as Google announced the shutting down of Google+ after failing to disclose user data breaches for an undisclosed period of time. Its reported that the Company didn’t disclose leak for months to avoid a public relations headache and potential regulatory enforcement.
In a blog post about the shutdown, Google disclosed the data leak, which it said potentially affected up to 500,000 accounts. Up to 438 different third-party applications may have had access to private information due to the bug. Google apparently has no way of knowing whether they did because it only maintains logs of API use for two weeks.
“We found no evidence that any developer was aware of this bug or abusing the API, and we found no evidence that any profile data was misused,” Ben Smith, the vice-president of engineering, wrote in the blog post. Smith defended the decision not to disclose the leak, writing: “Whenever user data may have been affected, we go beyond our legal requirements and apply several criteria focused on our users in determining whether to provide notice.”
Now the question I have: Are these cloud and these large-scale platforms too large to secure and protect our data? Personally, I started self-hosting, securing my own data and information as much as possible. The attack surface with Facebook, Google, Facebook, cloud storage such as Box, Dropbox, Onedrive and email systems such as Office365, Yahoo, Outlook.