I bet all of you heard about that one Google+ scandal, with their data privacy bomb which exposed hundreds of thousands of users data.
For those who are new to Google somehow, that’s the deal: in 2018, WSJ reported that Google found a “glitch” in Google+ earlier that year, which affecting data security. Between 2015 and March 2018, this glitch allowed outside developers access to almost 500k (!!) users personal data.
And despite discovering this issues in March 2018, Google didn’t inform anybody about that to avoid regulatory issues. Simply – they didn’t want “problems with regulators which can affect their reputation” as they said.
They were hit with may suits due to this, and finally they [resolved with $350M](https://11thestate.com/cases/alphabet-investor-settlement) the one for the investors over stock drops, so if you invested in GOOG you can check it I guess.
Actually, I think that Google+ was over even back then, in precovid times, they didn’t have any features which weren’t improved by others already and in mooore handy way. So, they didn’t even have a chance to compete with any other platforms so it was kinda predetermined for them. And it’s good that they are paying at least something due to this fuck up.
