OPC inquiring about Google+ leak

The Office of the Privacy Commissioner (OPC) said it is gathering more information about whether the personal information of Canadians was implicated in a leak involving an Alphabet Inc. social network. “Google has contacted us regarding the incident and we will be following up to gather more information about this incident, including whether it affected any Canadian users,” OPC spokesman Corey Larocque confirmed in an email to The Wire Report. On Monday, a Wall Street Journal report revealed that the search engine behemoth had a software bug that possibly gave third-party developers access to the private data of up to 500,000 Google+ accounts via 438 applications. It’s unclear if Canadians were implicated in the leak. On the same day the Journal report was published, Google said in a blog post the bug gave third-party apps access to Google+ profile fields that were not marked as public. Those fields included name, email address, occupation, gender and age, but not posts, messages, Google account data or phone numbers, the company said, adding it had no evidence that any developer knew about the bug or that any profile data was misused. Google said in the blog post that it’s shutting down the consumer version of Google+. It reported low usage and engagement on the platform, revealing 90 per cent of user sessions were less than five seconds. The social network for businesses, however, will remain. The company also aims to limit the number of applications that will be allowed to ask for access to consumer Gmail data and limit apps’ ability to receive call logs and SMS permissions on Android, the post said. Citing a memo shared with senior executives, the Journal also reported that Google’s plan-of-action following the discovery of the leak -- which lasted from 2015 until it was patched in March 2018 -- was to conceal it to avoid raising the spectre of regulation and a comparison to Facebook Inc.’s data leak to Cambridge Analytica.

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OPC inquiring about Google+ leak

Brief | October 10, 2018

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