The Wall Street Journal:

Google exposed the private data of hundreds of thousands of users of the Google+ social network and then opted not to disclose the issue this past spring, in part because of fears that doing so would draw regulatory scrutiny and cause reputational damage, according to people briefed on the incident and documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

For those who don’t want to deal with paywalls, TechCrunch has a good breakdown.

So…this is where the rubber meets the road regarding privacy, eh?

Sure, “only" 500k users were affected, but the fact that this was known, and not shared, since MARCH is a real bad look.

I do appreciate that their overall response is to just kill off Google+.