Google+ public posts will be preserved by Internet Archive before it is shut down

After Google+ suffered a data breach that was brought to light last year, the technology giant announced that it will be closing down the social networking platform in April 2019. Considering that the said date is now just weeks away, the Internet Archive and the ArchiveTeam has said that it is working to preserve public posts on Google+ before Google begins deleting all the data next month. If this is not done, even the public posts on the platform will vanish forever.

The websites took to Reddit to explain the method that they are taking to archive the posts. The post on Reddit says that scripts will be used to capture the data and back it up in order to keep them safe. However, it has been pointed out by the teams that their efforts will focus on only on the posts that are visible to the public and they would not be able to take a backup of the posts that have been marked as private by the user. And needless to say, even the ones that have been deleted would not be archived too.

The teams have also asked people who do not wish to have their data archived to go and delete their Google+ accounts. A procedure that can be followed to remove specific content from the social media website has also been specified. However, even in the posts that will be archived, the teams would not be able to capture everything.

For instance, comment threads will have a limit of 500 comments when being recorded, “but only presents a subset of these as static HTML. It’s not clear that long discussion threads will be preserved.” It has also been mentioned that images and videos from Google+ will not be saved at full resolution.

As we mentioned earlier, Google+ saw a major data breach last year in October. While Google said that its platform has “low usage and engagement” and a majority of sessions on the social media website only lasted for roughly 5 seconds. Although even back then Google announced that its social media website will be closed down, the timeline was shifted after the platform suffered a second data breach. The new timeline for deletion of all consumer data was decided to be April 2.

However, in February this year, the company stopped letting users create new profile pages and communities on Google+.

The teams that have posted on Reddit have said that their mission is to preserve parts of internet so that people will be able to look at them in future. They have also added that they save contents from popular websites before they are shut down or die a slow death.