Blippy.com allows users to create a profile and register a credit card for the purpose of tracking and posting what has been purchsed. It’s sort of like a large Facebook wall and all of your “friends” can now see that you just spent $200 on mint action figures for your collection. Seems like a weird startup to say the least, but now that the site as leaked it’s 5th credit card number to the Google Cache, the site might be hurtin’ to stay online.
More or less, the information on Blippy’s site is getting picked up by the Google crawlers and posted when you do a simple search at Google.com. Recent purchases, locations of the purchase and what credit card was used is all visable to any user that does these searches. The co-founder, Ashvin Kumar, says that there is a possibility information can be leaked, but it would have to include the following:
The user had to sign up for Blippy prior to February 3rd, 2010.
The user had to link a credit or debit card account to Blippy.
The user had a public account on Blippy.
The user’s bank must include credit card numbers in the line-item purchases on their credit card statement. So instead of the usual statement showing “Quiznos,” the bank statement would list something similar to “Quiznos from card number 4444…..” To date, we’ve only found 2 banks that do this, and no major banks.
The Google cache for a purchase on Blippy from that credit card must not have been updated since early February, 2010.
Even though it is only 5 users cards that were leaked, I think there is a lot to be said about people sharing information like this online. It’s safe to shop online, but what is the purpose of making your purchases public to your “friends”? I guess I just do not see the reason for signing up to the site.
I can not understand why sensitive data such as credit card numbers are not encrypted all the time and only decrypted when they are used. Is that really hard to do? I have worked on applications that handle credit cards and an no time is the credit card unencrypted other than to process it.
Try to pay off smallest card first and then use that money toward your larger cards as the balances are paid off. With Debt consolidating you have to make way more than the minimum payment but it does reduce your interest. If you can try to transfer balances to lower interest cards.