On Monday Google said that nearly 500,000 Google+ user accounts were potentially affected by the bug which might have exposed their data for the external developers and the company would be shutting down the social network for the consumers.
The unnamed sources and the internal documents said that the Google said not to disclose the issues fearing the regulatory scrutiny.
The software glitch in the social site said that the outside developers potential access to the private Google+ profile data between 2015 and March 2018 when the internal investigators have discovered and have fixed the issue says the report.
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Google even owns the shares of Alphabet Inc went down 2.6 per cent at $1138.53. The data that got affected is limited to the static and optional Google+ profile fields those include the name, email, gender, age, occupation and address said Google.
“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,” Google said.
According to the memo prepared by the legal and the policy staff which was shared with the senior executives have warned that disclosing the incident would likely to trigger the immediate regulatory interest and would invite the comparisons to Facebook’s leak of user’s personal data and other information to the data firm Cambridge Anallytica, the report said.
Allegations of the improper use of data for 87 million Facebook users by Cambridge Analytica, which was hired by President Donald Trump’s 2016 U.S. election campaign, has hurt the shares of the world’s biggest social network and prompted multiple official investigations in the United States and Europe.
Sundar Pichai, the Chief Executive Officer was even briefed on the plan of notifying the users after the internal committee reached the decision says the report. In weighing whether to disclose the incident, the company considered “whether we could accurately identify the users to inform, whether there was any evidence of misuse, and whether there were any actions a developer or user could take in response,” a Google spokesman told. “None of thresholds were met here.”
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