Flashback 2018: Worst year for Facebook, Google Plus
New Delhi : The year 2018 was not so good for social media giants. In fact, we can say it has been a worst year in the history of Facebook and Google Plus. While Facebook suffered from scandals, Google Plus was hit with security disaster. Before we hope to have a great 2019, let's take a look back at the scandals that rocked the world of social media this year.
In March 2018, New York Times and The Guardian published reports of how Facebook data of 50 million users was illegally harvested by a British firm called Cambridge Analytica. The outcome of this scandal was that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg eventually had to appear in front of committees of both the US Senate and House of Representatives and answer questions related to this issue.
In April again Facebook revealed that the data of nearly all of its 2 billion users was likely scraped, possibly by malicious actors. However, thanks to a search feature for account recovery, which used the email and phone number from the profile. Facebook said it would be disabling this feature.
In June, another The New York Times investigation revealed that Facebook had special “data sharing partnerships” with over 60 smartphone makers, which were in place for years. Some of these were with Chinese firms like Lenovo and Huawei, which were all under the scanner in the US. Apple was also on the list, though CEO Tim Cook said they got zero data from Facebook.
Facebook’s Onavo Protect app, a VPN-based data collection app, was pulled from the Apple App Store. The app was violating data collection guidelines. It was reported that the app helped Facebook figure out its video strategy and track potential competing apps in the social media space.
In September, Facebook saw a massive security breach and had to reset 90 million accounts. Around 50 million users accounts were compromised as a security vulnerability allowed hackers to log into their accounts. As a precaution, Facebook reset a total of 90 million accounts.Hackers got access to the 50 million accounts by exploiting bugs in Facebook’s code and stole “access tokens,” or digital keys to gain access.
In October, Google announced its own set of problems with Google Plus social network. Google Plus had a major security flaw, which had been spotted back in March 2018, and apparently compromised 500,000 accounts. Google, however, insisted it had not found any case of abuse or potential abuse by any developer thanks to the bug in its application programming interface (API), which gave access to private data to these third-party app developers.
In December, Google announced that it would shut down the Google Plus network in April 2019, instead of August 2019. This was because Google discovered a second bug, which breached the data of 52.5 million users.
