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No Privacy Worries Right? Blippy Credit Card Numbers in Google
Earlier this morning Venturebeat editor Owen Thomas noticed that some credit card numbers from purchase sharing service Blippy were shared on Google. You can see Owen’s tweet to Blippy staff asking about the issue and here’s the Google search results.
I went through all 16 pages of results on Google and it looks like there are only a few credit card numbers that are repeated many times. From what I can tell, the overall actual credit card numbers shared are less than 10 although this is just from one search query – no idea if other queries would provide more numbers.
I have emailed the Blippy team for more info and will update this post when I hear back.
In other Blippy news, they just announced a new round of funding yesterday – Techcrunch notes a valuation just near $50 million.
Update: Owen has just posted regarding this issue on Venturebeat.
Update 2: If you change the timeframe on the Google search results, it looks like this data is at least two weeks old. The numbers only appear in the “all time” results.
Update 3: VentureBeat spoke with Blippy founder Pud – read the full email here – it appears as I noted above, it was only for 4 credit cards during their very early days. I’m not sure how that changes how Blippy users will feel about any cc numbers being publicly shared.
Here’s a sample from Google – I crossed out the actual credit card numbers.
Owen’s article said the issue was with Citibank Mastercard. Still a bad bug, but I selfishly know I’m not impacted. :)
how would your reaction be different if it was your cc?
Blippy’s valuation is now approaching $0. We already know how badly Citibank did in 2008/2009.
I just dont get this service anyway? why would some give a damn what I bought.
Am curious if this data bled into twitter as well, since you can apparently blip your spending to twitter. A cursory search didn’t reveal anything but twitter’s search is limited to less than two weeks of data.
as i noted in my post – and now confirmed by blippy, this isolated incident happened months ago – so yes, you are right, twitter search wouldn’t find it.
I’d blame the script-kiddie amateur coders these start ups like to hire.
That’s what you got when you hire a cheap developer.