> We discovered this bug as part of our standard and ongoing testing procedures and fixed it within a week of it being introduced. No third party compromised our systems, and we have no evidence that the app developers that inadvertently had this access for six days were aware of it or misused it in any way.
I know you can't say "no one did", but I wish announcements like this gave some level of confidence. "All API calls are logged and no 3rd party made calls that exploited this vulnerability" is very different from "We have no idea if anyone used this, but there's no proof that they did".
I mean, one has to assume your data was exposed anyway, but still, it'd be nice to know.
You should be testing your software at every step of its lifecycle, especially in production. Production is where it matters if there's bugs.
If Google Drive had a failure like this it would be a lot worse than Google+. And that's a much more complex environment.
The technical constraints that protect data are pretty solid, and I have no concern at all about any kind of generalized breach or exposure with one of Google's core data systems like drive, docs, and Gmail. But looking at the sharing configuration for g+, it's just not intuitive what's shared and with whom, because the states seem to contradict each other.
You can have proper technical controls managing your permissions only if you can articulate what those permissions are supposed to be. And you can't just v2 the API with a better sharing model because users have already expressed their intent using the old model. You'd have to reacquire user intent, which is basically a non-starter.
So either you put up with a crap sharing model which is impossible to get right, or you delete everything and start over. It's no wonder they're killing it.