The State of Rhode Island, Office of the Rhode Island General Treasurer, acting on behalf of the Employees’ Retirement System of Rhode Island, recently filed a motion for consolidation of the two lawsuits and appointment as lead plaintiff in a securities lawsuit filed in the Northern District of California against Alphabet, Inc., the parent of Google.

Google announced this week that it discovered a bug that potentially exposed personal information of approximately 52.5 million Google+ users this week. Google’s announcement stated also that Google+ will be shutting down in April, 2019, a few months earlier than originally planned. Google stated that the bug allowed app developers to view user profile information even when the user settings were set to not-public. Google maintained that no third party was known to have compromised its systems or misused the information.

The Retirement System alleged that the state pension fund lost more than $4.8 million in the stock market after the privacy breach was first announced in October. We identified shareholders’ derivative suits involving allegations of data security breaches as an area to watch over two years ago. It looks like these types of lawsuits will continue to be more common after major a data breach.

[View source.]