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Comment by sctb | Hacker News Reader

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sctb

Related discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18169027.

Edit: here are some other articles providing coverage:

https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/8/17951914/google-plus-data...

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/08/google-reportedly-exposed-pr...

https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/08/google-plus-hack/

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-45792349

https://variety.com/2018/digital/news/google-plus-shut-down-...

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/google-says-it-found-...

https://www.businessinsider.com/google-shutters-google-socia...

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This is not a news article, though - it's a one-sided PR piece that greatly minimizes important points about the story and completely ignores other points (e.g. the regulation angle). You should have let another news story take its spot; there are plenty others that are not paywalled.

In my opinion the entire privacy breach is a non-issue. Here is what I think happened:

Some engineer at Google found a bug in Google Plus that could be used to access private data. The issue was investigated by the security team. They find that no harm was done. Incidents like this happen somewhat regularly at any tech company. Normally nobody thinks twice about it or even thinks about disclosing it to the public.

However, Google wanted to shut down Google Plus and wanted to avoid a backslash like with Google Reader. They used this bug as a pretext. Before Google releases this blog post, the post gets leaked the WSJ. The WSJ then puts a spin on it that Google didn't expect, because the narrative fits well into the current news cycle.

By Google's own admission, there is no way for them to know if the issue was abused because they only keep two weeks of log data. If there was a way for them to have found that "no harm was done", they would be emphatically making that point, not the opposite.

Agreed. This is the same story as when Intel shut down the Basis watch.

All the existing articles are just parroting what's already in Google's blog post. IMO unless there's some new information being added by third parties, it's always better to link the original source.

I guess we'll leave both stories up for now since at a minimum they emphasize different aspects (the data breach in one, the Google+ shutdown in the other).

Sure thing, if there's a news article that provides additional information from its own sources and supersedes the Google post, we can update the link.

Many articles fit such a description but were “duped”. Wouldn’t it benefit the site if at least one of those were allowed to exist alongside what is essentially Google’s response? The title of this article doesn’t even convey the most important point here, which is that hundreds of thousands of users had personal data leaked; instead, it conveys the idea that Google is doing something to “Protect data” which is something that people might not care to read if they didn’t know it was related to a breach.

Yes that's a good point, and it seems like the WSJ article has gone further into the story so we've un-duped it. There's a workaround for the paywall in the thread.

Thank you.

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