Blippy, is a social network for shoppers. Blippy users share with each other what they have just bought and socialize around their purchases. Apparently, some users got much more than they signed up for when there credit card numbers showed up on Google recently.
When a power user entered search term site:blippy.com “from card” , Google showed him a number of recent purchases by Blippy users along with their credit card numbers. As reported by VentureBeat, most of them were Citibank issued master card numbers. Investigation is still underway to determine how this happened, but Google has meanwhile blocked all searches for the site Blippy.com
What makes the event more interesting is the reply by Blippy Co-Founder Philip Kaplan, who says it is not as bad as it looks. According to him, we hand our credit card to waiters and cashiers all the time and the 4 users affected by this incident need not worry since they are not responsible for any purchases made without their permission. He further explains how the credit card numbers go back during Blippy’s beta days when the data was on HTML pages and somehow those pages were still in Google cache.
Even though, the incident didn’t cause much damage, it is still shocking to see how vulnerable sensitive information has become due to it being accessed by every mom and pop social network. It is also interesting to know that Blippy had raised $11 Million of funding just a day before this credit card fiasco.
source: http://asurl.net/kuY
