Credit where due: the NY Times Bits blog already has the full skinny up:
In a phone interview Friday morning, Blippy’s co-founder, Philip Kaplan, said the card numbers in question belonged to four Blippy users. He explained that when people link their credit cards to Blippy, merchants pass along their raw transaction data – including some credit card numbers – and the site scrubs that information to present just the merchant and the dollar amount spent. But several months ago, when Blippy was being publicly tested, that raw transaction data was present in the site’s HTML code, where it was retrieved by Google.
Holy crap. This is crazy. And there are still lots of numbers up on Google with the right search terms. This is insane.
Blippy Exposing Users’ Credit Card Numbers To Internet - The Consumerist
Sorry, even without listing my credit card number, exposing every purchase I make to the public Internet is the most absurd thing I've ever heard.
And yes, Blippy didn't mean to do it, but I'm sorry--it's just the dumbest thing in the world to want to do. You might as well hang a list of cool stuff you own on your front door so any passing thieves can have a look at a menu.
Likewise, this is why I'm not active on any location-based sites. It really is kind of stupid to provide such an easy tool to determine when you're not at home and when you are.
See, what I do when I want to let people know about the cool thing I just bought or the cool place I'm visiting is mention it on Twitter. Or take a picture or shoot a video and post it to my stream.
K.I.S.K: Keep It Simple, Kids!
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