Quote: Google announced today that it is shutting down the Google+ social network after the company's engineers found an API bug that might have exposed some private profile data for more than 500,000 Google+ users.
The company said the bug was located in the Google+ People API. By default, Google+ users can grant access to their profile data to third-party apps. Just like with Facebook and Twitter, Google+ users can also allow a third-party app to access the public profile information of a user's friends.

But in a blog post today, Ben Smith, Google Fellow and Vice President of Engineering, said the bug allowed third-party apps to also gain access to users' data that was marked private, not just the public data the apps would have normally been allowed to see. According to the Google+ Profile API documentation, profile fields can store a treasure trove of sensitive user details such as such as name, email address, occupation, gender, age, nickname, birthday, just to name a few.