Blippy: Credit Card Numbers Shared - or - Hey, World! Wanna Watch Me Buy Dental Floss?!

"The Blippy Leak: How Credit Card Numbers Got In Google"
PCWorld (April 23, 2010)

"I don't know if you've heard, but social shopping site Blippy made a little slippy.

"Blippy, a four-month-old startup funded partially by Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, lets you create a 'social stream' of all your credit card purchases. You set up an account, punch in your credit card number, and then Blippy automatically posts all of your purchases (including their prices) to your profile.

"It's basically a massive privacy invasion, only it's voluntary -- and, for whatever reason, people like it. Today, however, a few of Blippy's users realized the service was inadvertently sharing far more than they realized...."

Apparently it didn't affect everybody on Blippy, but some folks wound up with their credit card numbers in the HTML code or their profiles. A casual look at the page with a browser wouldn't show them - but a targeted Google search would 'see' the credit card numbers.

From what PCWorld said, anybody with a text editor should be able to get at the things.

Good news: Blippy says they've fixed the glitch; and it wasn't all that bad, anyway.

Blippy could be right.

What floors me is that there are enough people interested in sharing what they buy with credit cards to make Blippy a viable business.

I could see the fascination, if a vapid celebrity had a running data stream of their credit card activity. Folks buy those 'Hollywood gossip' magazines, after all. And I suppose there is a certain fascination in knowing just what Fifi VaVoom or Dirk Broadchin does each day.

Maybe most folks live more exciting lives than I do.