Google+ Class Action Starts Paying $ 2.15 For G + Privacy Breaches

Who remembers the sudden and dramatic death of Google+?

Competitor Facebook and Google’s “social backbone” had effectively died within the company around 2014, but Google left the failing service lying around for years in maintenance mode while the company created stand-alone products. In 2018, the Wall Street Journal reported that Google+ had exposed the private data of “hundreds of thousands of users” for years, which Google knew about the issue, and that the company chose not to disclose the data breach for fear of regulatory scrutiny. As a result of the report, Google was forced to acknowledge the data breach, and the company admitted that the “private” data of 500,000 accounts was in fact not private. Since no one was working on Google+ anymore, Google’s “fix” for the bug was to shut down Google+ completely. Then the prosecution began.

Today’s class action lawsuit, Matt Matic and Zak Harris vs. Google, was filed in October 2018 and blames Google’s “lax approach to data security” for the bugs. The complaint added: “Worse, after the discovery of this vulnerability on the Google+ platform, the defendants remained silent for at least seven months, making the calculated decision not to inform users that their personal information was compromised, compromising increasing the confidentiality of consumers’ information and putting them at risk of identity theft or worse. ”The case’s website with full details is at googleplusdatalitigation.com.

The case was settled in June 2020, with Google agreeing to pay $ 7.5 million. After losing about half of that money in legal and administrative fees, and with 1,720,029 people filling out the right forms by the October 2020 deadline, the payout for each person is $ 2.15.

This first Google+ data breach was active from 2015 to 2018 and gave developers full access to Google+ People API data, even for private profiles. This meant that any developer could retrieve all of the Google+ profile information you filled out, including your name, date of birth, gender, email address, relationship status, profession, and a list of where to go. You have lived. Two months later, Google announced a second Google+ privacy bug that again exposed that People API data, but this time for a whopping 52.5 million users. The case was then expanded to cover all of these people.

Google+ was killed in April 2019 and cannot hurt anyone anymore.