Google did not reveal a security breach because it feared a regulation

The private data of hundreds of thousands of users of Google’s social network, Google+, were exposed due to a software failure between 2015 and March 2016. However, the company decided not to disclose the potential risk to avoid damage to its reputation or regulation by the authorities in retaliation to avoid a repetition of it.

This is revealed by the WSJ in its Monday edition in which it explains that Google’s parent company, Alphabet, is going to launch new data protection measures and close this social network for consumers. This finally ends a line of business that for years has tried to compete, without success, with Facebook.

The president of Alphabet, Sundair Pichai, was informed that an internal committee had already made the decision not to make public information when it was discovered.

This committee examined whether users who might have been affected could be identified, if there was evidence that the data had been used and the response that had to be given to it. The company determined that there was no evidence that private data had been used although there was no reliable way of verifying it.

The profiles contain data such as names, email addresses, date of birth, gender, photos, addresses, relationships, and so on. They are data, that crossed with others can make the privacy of the identity of the users very vulnerable.

Social networks, companies that provide services and those that obtain it because they provide services to third parties (such as credit bureaus) have increasingly access to data from their consumers because the importance of privacy has been lowered. But there are still gaps by mistake or attacks on the security of these data and many of them are exposed.

That can end up passing invoices to consumers because their identities can be stolen and thus be exposed to all kinds of problems, from financial to legal. Knowing that the data may be or have been committed with some urgency allows to put some remedies. If the companies do not make it public, as it happens in many cases, the solution may come very late.