FILE - In this Dec. 4, 2017 file photo, people walk by Google offices in New York. Google is closing the consumer version of its long-spurned Plus social network after discovering a bug earlier this year... (Associated Press) 
 
 FILE - In this Dec. 4, 2017 file photo, people walk by Google offices in New York. Google is closing the consumer version of its long-spurned Plus social network after discovering a bug earlier this year that leaked some of the personal information about up to 500,000 people who still have accounts... (Associated Press) 
 
 FILE - In this Dec. 4, 2017 file photo, people walk by Google offices in New York. Google is closing the consumer version of its long-spurned Plus social network after discovering a bug earlier this year that leaked some of the personal information about up to 500,000 people who still have accounts... (Associated Press) FILE - In this Dec. 4, 2017 file photo, people walk by Google offices in New York. Google is closing the consumer version of its long-spurned Plus social network after discovering a bug earlier this year... (Associated Press) 
 
 SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Google is shutting down its long-shunned Plus social network for consumers, following its disclosure of a flaw discovered in March that could have exposed some personal information of up to 500,000 people. 
 
 The announcement came in a Monday blog post , which marked Google's first public description of the privacy bug. 
 
 Google deliberately avoided disclosing the problem at the time, in part to avoid drawing regulatory scrutiny and damaging its reputation, according to a Wall Street Journal story that cited anonymous individuals and documents. 
 
 The Mountain View, California, company declined to comment on the Journal's report, and didn't fully explain in its blog post why it held off on revealing the bug until Monday. 
 
 The Google Plus flaw could have allowed up to 438 external apps to scoop up user names, email addresses, occupations, genders and ages without authorization. The company didn't find any evidence that any of the personal information affected by the Plus breach was misused. 
 
 The timeline laid out by Google indicates the company discovered the privacy lapse around the same time that Facebook was under fire for a leak in its far more popular social network. Facebooks' breakdown exposed the personal information of as many as 87 million of its users to Cambridge Analytica, a data mining firm affiliated with President Donald Trump's 2016 campaign. 
 
 Congress summoned CEO Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to be grilled about his company's privacy issues in April. 
 
 Google CEO Sundar Pichai recently declined to an invitation to travel to Washington to testify before the Senate about foreign governments' manipulation of online services to sway U.S. political elections. His absence incensed some lawmakers, who left an empty chair for Google alongside the Twitter and Facebook executives who appeared before the Senate committee in September. 
 
 "With this breach announcement, the empty seat bearing Google's name just became a lot hotter," said Mike Chapple, an associate professor of information technology, analytics and operations at the University of Notre Dame. 
 
 Pichai went to Washington to mend political fences with lawmakers in late September and agreed to participate in a White House roundtable on technology that President Trump intends to attend. He also will appear in House hearings after the midterm elections in November. 
 
 Google has a strong incentive to position itself as a trustworthy guardian of personal information because, like Facebook, its financial success hinges on its success to learn about the interests, habits and location of its users in order to sell targeted ads. 
 
 The desire to peer into people's lives is one of the reasons that Google launched Plus in 2011. It was supposed to be a challenger to Facebook's social network, which now has more than 2 billion users. But Plus flopped and quickly turned into a digital ghost town, prompting Google to start de-emphasizing it several years ago. 
 
 But the company kept it open long enough to cause an embarrassing privacy gaffe that could give Congress an excuse to enact tighter controls on data collection. 
 
 "Every data mishap strengthens the bipartisan case for Congress to take action on data protection," said Jonathan Mayer, an assistant professor at Princeton University who formerly worked in the Federal Communications Commission's enforcement bureau. 
 
 Europe began to impose tougher online privacy regulations in May. Those rules also include disclosure requirements for data breaches. Those rules don't apply to the Plus problem because Google discovered it before they took effect. 
 
 ___ 
 
 AP Technology Writer Frank Bajak in Boston contributed to this story. ||||| Google 
 
 After Google announced on Tuesday that it was integrating material from Google Plus into its search results, the Web shot back , accusing the company of pushing aside competing social networks like Twitter and Facebook. 
 
 As my colleague Claire Cain Miller wrote, Google is adding a feature it calls Search Plus Your World, where Google searches will turn up Google Plus posts from friends. 
 
 Of course, these Google Plus results will stand higher on the page than information from other social networks. Searching someone’s name, for example, will put that person’s Google Plus page directly at the top of the Google search box. 
 
 James Grimmelmann, an associate professor at New York Law School who specializes in Internet law, wrote on Twitter, “Today is a good day to turn off Google+ and delete your Google Profile. I just did.” 
 
 “I don’t like it. I don’t like it for its effect on competition, and I don’t like it for what it does to people’s privacy,” Mr. Grimmelmann added in a phone interview. “It breaks down a very clear conceptual divide between things that are private and things that are public online.” He added that many Google users would find the integration confusing, and that the updates would lead to a “sense of erosion of their privacy.” 
 
 Google could argue that Facebook does not make its updates public to search engines, so Google cannot highlight this content in search results. But Twitter does. All Twitter messages are public, unless a person designates an account as private, and they are accessible to any search engine. 
 
 Facebook and Google did not respond to a request for comment. Twitter issued a statement saying that the change could be bad for users and others: 
 
 For years, people have relied on Google to deliver the most relevant results anytime they wanted to find something on the Internet. Often, they want to know more about world events and breaking news. Twitter has emerged as a vital source of this real-time information, with more than 100 million users sending 250 million Tweets every day on virtually every topic. As we’ve seen time and time again, news breaks first on Twitter; as a result, Twitter accounts and Tweets are often the most relevant results. We’re concerned that as a result of Google’s changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone. We think that’s bad for people, publishers, news organizations and Twitter users. 
 
 Alex Macgillivray, Twitter’s general counsel on policy, trust and safety, said on his company’s service that this was a “bad day for the Internet.” Mr. Macgillivray, who once worked as a lawyer for Google, said he could imagine the opposition within the company to “search being warped this way.” 
 
 Mark A. Lemley, a professor at Stanford Law School who directs the program in law, science and technology, said in a phone interview: “There is a lot of concern on various fronts about Google favoring Google in its own search results, and I think this will add to that concern.” Mr. Lemley has worked with Google in the past on unrelated legal matters. 
 
 Professor Lemley said that the move should not be viewed in anticompetitive terms. “It can’t be the rule that if Facebook says no, you can’t search our links, that Google can’t search its own links. That is not antitrust.” 
 
 John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, also took to Twitter, writing: “We are becoming helpless collateral casualties in the war between Google and Facebook.” 
 
 As every company tries to be everything to everyone, consumers seem to be suffering from the effects of a siloed Internet. 
 
 Mr. Grimmelmann of New York Law School added: “In Google’s own interest, they should continue to focus on building a really great search platform, and not trying to prop up a not very great social network by roping it to a search engine.” ||||| New ways in which Facebook might have played a role in 2016 election meddling continue to emerge. Yesterday (March 16), the company announced the suspension of data analytics company Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL) and its prominent parent political firm Cambridge Analytica—three years after it illegally used the data of up to 50 million users. 
 
 According to a note shared by the company, in 2015 Facebook found out that, despite telling its users otherwise, Cambridge professor Aleksandr Kogan passed user data collected through personality testing app “thisisyourdigitallife” (which touted itself as a personality test used by psychologists) to the political firm Cambridge Analytica—a company owned by Robert Mercer and led by Steve Bannon at the time—and to Christopher Wylie, from a digital service company called Eunoia Technologies. 
 
 The 270,000 people who downloaded the app allowed it access not only to their data, but some of their friends’—depending on their settings. However, they did not authorize that their data be shared with other companies, a behavior that is in violation of Facebook platform policies. The revelation comes from reporting by The Observer. 
 
 According to Wylie, a whistleblower who detailed the illegal data use, saying the information was used in 2014 to profile individual US voters who were then served Donald Trump ads during the election. “We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons,” Wylie told The Observer, “That was the basis that the entire company was built on.” 
 
 After finding out that the breach had happened, Facebook deleted the app, then requested a certification from all involved that the obtained data had been destroyed—but Facebook never followed up on it. “They waited two years and did absolutely nothing to check that the data was deleted. All they asked me to do was tick a box on a form and post it back,” Wylie said. 
 
 Only last month, Cambridge Analytica’s CEO and Facebook both told the British parliament the political firm did not harvest any of the social media user data to target election ads during Brexit. 
 
 The firm continues to deny the allegations: 
 
 Facebook has repeatedly denied that data breaches as the one detailed occurred—and even after finding out, years after the fact, that it had, the company defends its best practices. ”We are committed to vigorously enforcing our policies to protect people’s information,” Facebook states in the same note that admits their “vigorous enforcement” consisted in taking the word of someone who had already broken their regulation to ensure said information was protected. 
 
 Further, the note tries to put the responsibility of controlling such information on the user, but highlighting a the “ways we give people the tools to control their experience.”
– Google is shutting down its long-shunned Plus social network for consumers, following its disclosure of a flaw discovered in March that could have exposed some personal information of up to 500,000 people, the AP reports. The announcement came in a Monday blog post, which marked Google's first public description of the privacy bug. Google deliberately avoided disclosing the problem at the time, in part to avoid drawing regulatory scrutiny and damaging its reputation, according to a Wall Street Journal story that cited anonymous individuals and documents. The Mountain View, Calif., company declined to comment on the Journal's report, and didn't fully explain in its blog post why it held off on revealing the bug until Monday. As for Google+, it will be shut down over the next 10 months, but will remain open for enterprise customers who use it within their companies. When Google launched Plus in 2011, it was supposed to be a challenger to Facebook's social network, which now has more than 2 billion users. But Plus flopped and quickly turned into a digital ghost town, prompting Google to start de-emphasizing it several years ago. But the company kept it open long enough to cause an embarrassing privacy gaffe that could give Congress an excuse to enact tighter controls on data collection. The Google Plus flaw could have allowed up to 438 external apps to scoop up user names, email addresses, occupations, genders, and ages without authorization. The company didn't find evidence that any of the personal information affected by the Plus breach was misused. The timeline laid out by Google indicates the company discovered the privacy lapse around the same time Facebook was under fire for a leak in its far more popular social network. Facebook's breakdown exposed the personal information of as many as 87 million users to Cambridge Analytica, a data mining firm affiliated with President Trump's 2016 campaign.