Google+ users may be entitled to all of £9 after class-action lawsuit

Were you a member of Google+ before it shut down in 2019? You could be in the money — sort of.

If you can cast your mind back to 2018, it was discovered that a privacy flaw in the Google social network allowed any third-party developer to obtain private data from any user profile. It's thought up to 500,000 users were at risk, an astounding breach of privacy.

Google shut the network down as a result and a class-action lawsuit was filed against the tech giant for the lax security approach.

This lawsuit was settled earlier this year for a total of $7.5 million, which means if you were a Google+ user you could be eligible to make a claim and you get around $12, or £9 for your troubles.

How can I make a Google+ claim?

To be in with a chance of gaining access to that £9, you need to have been based in the US and using Google+ between January 1, 2015 and April 2, 2019.

There are a few other caveats too: you have to have had your non-public profile information exposed as a result of the platform’s software bug.

If that’s you, then you can go to the dedicated settlement website and make a claim.

$12 doesn’t sound like a lot but once you take into account things like legal fees, it means that around 450,000 people should be able to claim the funds.

Unsurprisingly, people weren’t too impressed by how much of a small amount was on offer.

There were other issues at stake too. Due to the nature of the settlement email, many thought it was actually a phishing scam with people taking to Twitter to warn other people not to click through to the links.

However, Google confirmed to 9to5Google that the settlement email was legitimate but there was a brief outage last night which meant the email’s links weren’t working but that should be fixed now.

Go ahead and claim away but remember, it will only work if you were based in the US during the time period.

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