Saturday, April 24, 2010

Blippy screw-up exposes customers' credit cards on Google

Blippy calls itself "a fun and easy way to see and discuss what everyone is buying." Call me crazy, but I've never thought the service was a great idea. I mean...if I really want to tell people what I was spending money on, I could just tweet about it or post it on my Facebook wall.

...And at least I wouldn't be giving my credit card number out. And since I wouldn't be giving out my number, it would never have appeared in Google search results accidentally.

No, I don't think there's a big number of people who would be performing the query "site:blippy.com +"from card", but that's hardly the point. Someone figured out that it worked, and someone saw a whole lotta numbers they shouldn't have seen. If you ask me, this is a punji stick their users were waiting to step on.

I guess maybe I'm a little closed-minded about this, but I can't think of any reason why anyone would want to enable this kind of access to their credit card data. Would I ever sign up after this? Hell no, but you couldn't have convinced me to sign up for a Blippy account before this screw-up happened.

Boy, they sure are lucky they announced their big $11+ million funding win just before this news came out...

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