Farewell to Google+: The Damage of Data Breaches

What happens when the data of individuals is attacked repeatedly on the commercial online market?

The online market thrives on the exchange of personal information, buyer data, pictures, documents, books, ultimately anything we create online can be turned into a product that can be tracked and exchanged for a benefit. Users willingly give over personal information for the benefit of services. Online services that users will take to be "free", all come with a cost: an email address, a profile set-up, a credit card on file for a future purchase, a picture of you using a product or even a review, the list is endless... what was the last thing you uploaded to any major social site for free? 

In an industry that previously self-imposed date protection, robust sites with limitless data and even small sites are increasingly being held to new standards. The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is the most inclusive data regulation that protects their citizen data and the penalty applies internationally. The failure to comply results in a hefty fine of 20 million Euros or 4% of the company’s global revenue, whichever is larger. Here is a Forbes check list to help you comply.  

As governments attempt to catch up in the codification of online data or just ban the service, individuals and businesses are having to contort their creations to comply. While Facebook continually tries to adapt and change to meet outside standards, others are throwing in the towel and revamping completely.  
 
Google+, a social media service that was aimed at collecting your data and marketing it in the form of pages, groups and more, suffered a data breach of over 500,000 accounts that was not disclosed to the public, and later revealed that over 52 million accounts were breached. These breaches have sever consequences for companies and users.

Google+ will be shut down in April 2019 instead of August. Users will not be able to set-up new accounts and it is imperative that current users download and save their content somewhere else because they are going to lose access as the service shuts down. Want to know how to download you Google+ profile? Click here.