Okay Geek Farm
Blippy user's Credit card Numbers appear on Google Results
Brandon Davenport
There has been a failure on the internets - Blippy users had their Credit card numbers appearing in Google search results, which is not a super great thing. This means right inside the results, there would be the users credit card info right below the link on Google. This was bad news for all Blippy users who share their credit card and bank account information, of which Blippy says that “Blippy is very concerned about safeguarding the confidentiality of your personally identifiable information” and says they employ administrative, physical and electronic measures. So did they fix it?
Yes, Blippy is fixing the issue, along side with Google. Google is working to no longer show the snippets for the cached Blippy links, and Blippy has outlined their explination into what happened, and why it happened:
- Say you buy lunch at Quiznos. Your credit card statement shows a complex entry like “Quiznos Inc Store #1234 San Francisco.” But Blippy cleans this up to only show ‘Quiznos.’ We refer to these as the “raw data” vs the “cleaned up data.”
- Raw data is typically harmless. But it turns out that some credit cards (four out of thousands in this case) show the credit card number in the raw data. For example, “Quiznos Inc Store #1234 from card 4444….”
- Many months ago when we were first building Blippy, some raw (not cleaned up, but typically harmless) data could be viewed in the HTML source of a Blippy web page. The average user would see nothing, but a determined person could see “raw” line items. Still, this was mostly harmless — stuff like store numbers and such. And it was all removed and fixed quickly.
- Enter Google’s cache. Turns out Google indexed some of this HTML, even though it wasn’t visible on the Blippy website. And exposed four credit card numbers (but a scary 196 search results).
- We’re working with Google now to remove Blippy from their cache, and they inform us it will be completed within a couple of hours.
More on Blippy Credit Numbers in Search Results
Read - Part 1 on Mashable
Read - Part 2 on Mashable
Read - Official Blippy Statement
