Google+, Google’s answer to Facebook, announced a few days ago in a simple blog post that the company will be “sunsetting consumer Google+.”

Almost hidden within talk of Project Strobe (a sort of audit for third-party apps and data privacy) was this simple declaration:

We are shutting down Google+ for consumers.

The decision seems to be the result of two things: that the platform failed to capture users’ attention, with 90 percent of Google+ user sessions lasting less than five seconds.

And second, a bug allowed apps access to people’s private data. More specifically, apps also had access to Profile fields that were shared with the user, but not marked as public. These included name, email address, occupation, gender, and age but not any other data you may have posted or connected to Google+ or any other service, like Google+ posts, messages, Google account data, phone numbers or G Suite content.

Even though…