Shares of Alphabet (GOOG, GOOGL) are under pressure after the Wall Street Journal reported the company had exposed the private data of Google+ social network users and then opted not to disclose the discovery of the bug that gave potential access to outside developers.

PRIVATE DATA EXPOSED: Citing people familiar with the matter and documents reviewed by the publication, the Wall Street Journal reported that Google exposed the private data of hundreds of thousands of users of the Google+ social network and then opted not to disclose the issue this past spring as it feared that doing so would draw regulatory scrutiny and cause reputational damage. As part of its response to the incident, the Alphabet unit plans to announce a sweeping set of data privacy measures that include permanently shutting down all consumer functionality of Google+, sources said. A software glitch in the social site, which was launched in 2011 to challenge Facebook (FB), gave outside developers potential access to private Google+ profile data between 2015 and March 2018, when internal investigators discovered and fixed the issue, the report noted. According to a memo reviewed by the Wall Street Journal, the company believed that disclosing the incident would likely trigger "immediate regulatory interest" and invite comparisons to Facebook's leak of user information to Cambridge Analytica.

FACEBOOK DATA BREACH: Earlier this year, Facebook disclosed that data from as many as 87M of its users may have been improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica, which had ties to the 2016 campaign of President Donald Trump. About 70.6M of the users were in the U.S.

PRICE ACTION: In afternoon trading, class A shares of Alphabet have dropped over 2% to $1,140.01.