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Sen. Blumenthal: FTC Needs to Investigate Google+

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) has called on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Google+ after the company pulled the plug on the consumer version of the social network.

Google VP of engineering Ben Smith blogged Monday (Oct. 8) that the company was shutting down Google+, its effort to take on Facebook in the social media sphere, but somewhat buried the lead that 500,000 accounts were affected by a glitch that allowed outside app developers access to profile data including e-mail addresses, occupation, gender and age.

https://www.broadcastingcable.com/news/ ... ate-google

I hope this happens. Google+ was such a monumental fail that the white-is-right rightwingers were the only ones left using it. And yes that security breach is massive, and major.

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Stop calling the cops on us.

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Google also locked out a lot third party apps from accessing Gmail. There's supposedly a way to set up Thunderbird so it gets in, but when I did it all I got was a hung app.

It was fun to read the 20 or so "critical security warnings" in my e-mail while at the same time hearing what a security disaster Google was.

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"Our democratic institutions... seem to have been upended by frat-boy billionaires from California," remarked Canadian politician Charlie Angus. (BBC, 11/27/18)

Former Google designer blasts Google+, says the initiative was a mess from the start

When Google last week announced that it was axing Google+ for consumers, my first reaction was utter shock and disbelief — mostly because I had completely forgotten that Google’s ill-fated attempt at a Facebook clone was even still around. Originally launched in 2011, Google+ was essentially Google’s effort to wade into social networking waters and geniunely compete with Facebook.

Despite Google’s vast amount of resources and engineering talent, Google+ was something of a joke right from the start. And though the search giant did all sorts of crafty things to boost the cumulative number of Google+ users, user engagement on the site never even came close to matching what Facebook managed to achieve. With Google+ now nothing more than a footnote in tech history, Morgan Knutson — a former designer on the Google+ team — published a wild and completely enthralling recap of his time working on the site. Put simply, Knutson explains why Google+ was a mess — bureaucratic and otherwise — from the start.

https://bgr.com/2018/10/16/google-plus- ... -tell-all/