If you haven’t heard already, the consumer version of Google+ was permanently shutdown early this month. After Google first announced a rather gracious timeline to kill off the platform, the company decided to speed up its termination dramatically after a second security bug was revealed to impact millions of users.
Data breach affected millions of users
The March 2018 data breach is one of the main reasons why Google+ has been shutdown. A number of developers had access to the private information of over 500,000 accounts without user consent. This happened during the same time that Facebook faced immense pressure due to the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal, and just a few months before the new European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into effect.
The fact that Google did not disclose the data breach immediately left many profiles vulnerable. Even though the company claims that no data was misused, it did not inform the public in a timely manner, which gave rise to formal investigations by the United States government and the European Union.
Later that year in November, a second issue was uncovered with regard to the Google+ API. Third-party apps that requested rights to view profile data were also granted access to data the user specifically marked as non-public. Due to this major breach that affected almost 53 million users, Google decided to expedite the deprecation of the platform.
No match for other social media networks
Perhaps the most obvious reason for the fall of Google+ is its disappointing user base. Google came quite late to the game with its own social media platform after billions of people across the internet already had joined Facebook or Twitter.
Even though Google+ was able to amass quite a few dedicated communities, the platform never came close to the amount of active users other social media networks have. Google+ essentially became a platform for specific niches with less of a crowd but a more passionate community.
What does this mean for All in One SEO Pack?
Even though Google+ will still be around for enterprise customers who use G Suite, All in One SEO Pack will no longer support Google+. This means that we’re removing all related settings in our upcoming major 3.0 release.
If you’re concerned that this shutdown affects you in any other way, then we suggest that you check out Google’s support page.
2024 Update: Google has announced the shutdown of 20+ million business websites that were created with Google Business Profiles. Learn more in Google to Shut Down Business Sites Made with Business Profiles and Shutdown Alert: Alternatives to Google's Website Builder.
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That’s a good idea. We want All in One SEO pack to be exceptional.
Yes! We lost a great innovative social platform!
I loved using Google+ to share my website content and while the Business Page didn’t get many “official” followers, the traffic to the domain care of G+ was commendable so it was effective. Now we’re limited to the likes of Facebook with all the paid likes and limited engagement thanks to the endlessly changing algorithm. Oh well.
Thanks guys. Just installed your All in One SEO Pack plugin on my blog. I’m loving it.
Thanks! Please feel free to give us a 5-star review if you’d like to.
While I was on vacation, Vaultpress cancelled itself on me. On the advice of the Vaultpress happiness engineers, I just deactivated Vaultpress. My original intention is to reactivate it, but I want to be sure there is good reason to do so.
I already get website security and backups from GoDaddy, our website host.
I use google analytics all the time and do not want to lose my data history.
I do not use any of the advanced functions and for the moment don’t intend to.
Is there a good reason to reactivate Vaultpress?
Hi Brian,
This is a strange place to ask your question. 🙂
We were actually VaultPress customers from the beginning, since it was in beta, and finally cancelled our account this year. We never found its security alerts to be as good as the ones from Sucuri (what you likely have with Godaddy) or WordFence, and we found their backups to be unreliable.
Your Google Analytics data should be in your Google Analytics account. Backing up WordPress is unrelated.
Thanks! When major 3.0 will release?
Hi Peter,
We anticipate 3.0 to be released mid-May.
Thanks Arnaud, appreciate the update! It definitely seemed like a dying platform in my eyes, maybe they’ll find a way to make a comeback with it.