Google response
DILLIGAF
Google's parent has been hit with a lawsuit for failing to disclose to investors a bug – secretly fixed in March – that could have exposed half a million users' data. Last week Google admitted that it had discovered and patched a bug in one of its Google+ People APIs that meant third-party apps could access profile fields …
The stock market is intended to be about raising capital for the company by allowing anyone to buy part of it. This guy owns (a bit of) Alphabet.
If you float your company on the stock market, you are taking on a lot of legal duties and requirements to publish what's going on in your company.
Anything that is likely to materially affect the price is required to be made public at the earliest opportunity*, in order to allow the market to set a "fair price" for your company.
If you're privately owned, you don't need to do this - but it's harder to raise capital.
* There are limitations to this, but "we got hacked and we knew about it six months ago" seems unlikely to fall under them.
And, in other news, all 4 of G+'s users is starting a petition to stop Google from killing off G+
G+ moderators complain that their reports regarding spammers and spam goes unheeded, and spammers is havening a field day in the death throes of G+
Will be interesting going forward. Will investors also take Google to task for dropping G+?
Google cares about privacy and vulnerabilities when there's value in the data they've hoarded. Everything else is a festering scammer toolkit (Google Groups). It's interesting that they don't care about the G+ bug. One might conclude that G+ only attracted users belonging to undesirable marketing categories.