Google+, minus
The social network shuts down in disgrace
Avoiding bad publicity is, well, bad publicity
IT WAS not a good way to go. On October 8th Google said it was closing Google+, a social network that it had launched in 2011. On the face of it, that hardly matters: Google+ is a ghost town. Although the network notionally has hundreds of millions of users, Google itself admits that 90% of visits last less than five seconds. Few will miss it. The internet-search and advertising giant plans to resurrect some version of it for internal use in companies.
Less important than the fact of its closure, though, was the manner. The announcement came hours after the Wall Street Journal revealed that, in March, Google had discovered a bug in Google+’s code. Information that around half a million users had marked as private was nevertheless made visible to their friends and through them to more than 400 third-party apps.
Both the nature of the bug and its timing are significant. The bug has echoes of the way in which Cambridge Analytica, a British political-advertising firm, was able to illicitly harvest the data of more than 50m Facebook users in 2014. Those data were used to target advertisements in America’s presidential election and Britain’s referendum on leaving the European Union in 2016. When the data-harvesting was exposed, also in March, the resulting stink led to Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s boss, being summoned before America’s Congress. Cambridge Analytica shut down in May. (Its staff have since set up a new firm, called Auspex International.)
Internal documents show that Google’s lawyers were well aware of the risks of admitting to their own bug in the midst of the Cambridge Analytica furore. Disclosing it, they wrote, could invite “immediate regulatory interest”, and lead to Google “coming into the spotlight alongside or even instead of Facebook”. Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, might even have been dragged before legislators along with Facebook’s Mr Zuckerberg.
There are differences between Google’s case and Facebook’s. Only a hundredth as many people were affected. In a blog post Google said that, as far as it could tell, nobody else had spotted the bug and no data had actually leaked (although, less reassuringly, the firm keeps only two weeks of log data at any one time). That meant that, according to both the law and Google’s internal guidelines, there was no need to do anything other than fix the problem and stay mum.
That has not silenced claims of a cover-up: at least one lawsuit has already been filed. Perhaps to soften such accusations, the rest of the blog post talked at length about better privacy protections for users of Google’s other products. The firm plans to stop many third-party developers from reading text messages and call logs on smartphones running its Android operating system, for instance, and to reduce the number of developers allowed to develop add-ons to Gmail, a free email service that shows advertisements to users based on the content of their messages.
Tightening access to personal data should help make accidental exposures less likely in future. At the same time, regulators are picking up their cudgels. The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation came into force in May, two months after Google found its bug; it requires firms to disclose data breaches within 72 hours or face steep fines. California has passed a data-privacy law of its own, helped along by the Cambridge Analytica affair.
The internet giants seem to have accepted tighter regulations as inevitable. Their objective now is to try to shape them as best they can. Several big computing firms, including Google and Facebook, are lobbying America’s federal government over national privacy rules, to avoid having to comply with a patchwork of local state codes. The foxes have decided their best bet is to try to help build the henhouse.
This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline "Plus, minus" (Oct 11th 2018)
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