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Google+ is going bye bye. It shall not be missed.
October 08th, 2018
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Just saw this on BoingBoing, thought it was interesting... Apparently
Google is pulling the plug on Google+, I won't miss the damn thing, it
was so clunky compared to most of the competition, and practically
nobody I know uses it.
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Full repost from BoingBoing.net
By Cory Doctorow, originally published 11:25 AM, 8 October 2018
License, CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
RIP, Google+: long ailing and finished off by a security bug
There was a time when you could get the smartest people at Google to do
the stupidest things you could imagine by getting Yahoo to do them
first; thankfully that era ended -- only to be replaced by an era in
which every stupid thing Facebook did became a bucket-list item for
Google management.
The peak of this was when Google set out to create a social network and
tasked every googler with making it a success. The company decided to
call this network Google+, and decided that the longstanding, widely
used plus-sign (which historically was used in search queries to mean
"must have" as in +cory +doctorow) would be unilaterally repurposed for
use in its social network.
Googlers' bonuses were tied to their ability to integrate Google+ into
every product Google offered, creating an ever-tightening noose around
Google users who had no interest in using G+.
To make matters worse, Google decided to ape Facebook's privacy-
invading, nonsensical "real names" policy, insisting that every user
use their legal name and putting Google in the unenviable position of
deciding (for example) when a trans person could stop using their dead-
name, or when an indigenous person's name was "real" enough for use, or
when people fleeing domestic violence could use an alias.
By the time Google+ rolled out, there was already nascent discontent
with Facebook. Google+ offered all the downsides of Facebook, but with
fewer of the people you wanted to connect with.
Years later, G+ is a sad also-ran. What's more, the company just
discovered an extremely grave bug in the system - -- that would have
allowed for serious privacy violations. Though the company says it has
fixed the bug, it's taken the opportunity to simply shut down G+ for
"consumers" (the service will persist for enterprise users, who
apparently use it).
In the product's obituary, Google wrote that Google+ "has not achieved
broad consumer or developer adoption, and has seen limited user
interaction with apps."
One bright spot in all this: the defect in Google+ was discovered
through "Project Strobe," a serious privacy and security audit of every
Google product.
Our review showed that our Google+ APIs, and the associated
controls for consumers, are challenging to develop and maintain.
Underlining this, as part of our Project Strobe audit, we
discovered a bug in one of the Google+ People APIs:
* Users can grant access to their Profile data, and the public
Profile information of their friends, to Google+ apps, via the API
* The bug meant that apps also had access to Profile fields that
were shared with the user, but not marked as public.
* This data is limited to static, optional Google+ Profile fields
including name, email address, occupation, gender and age. (See
the full list on our developer site.) It does not include any
other data you may have posted or connected to Google+ or any
other service, like Google+ posts, messages, Google account data,
phone numbers or G Suite content.
Project Strobe: Protecting your data, improving our third-party APIs,
and sunsetting consumer Google+ [Ben Smith/Google Blog]
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