Category: stuff

With all the news that G+ has been hacked and is now to be shut down, I thought I would check to see if I still had an account and if I’d ever used it. 

Apparently yes I had one but no I had not used it. I was not alone. A full 90 percent of Google+ sessions were less than 5 seconds. So one could safely assume they clicked on something by mistake or were being forced into using it via dark patterns which Google used for years to try and give G+ traction (like enforcing G+ for YouTube).

My last post was 13 Dec 2011 and that was to wonder if I’d missed anything in the months since I made my first post. (I had not).

A security bug allowed third-party developers to access Google+ user profile data since 2015 until Google discovered and patched it in March. The company decided against informing the public at that time because it would lead to “us coming into the spotlight alongside or even instead of Facebook despite having stayed under the radar throughout the Cambridge Analytica scandal,” according to an internal memo.