When Blippy launched last fall, it was the first site to introduce the idea of publishing personal credit card and other purchases. My initial reaction; “who would do that?!?!”
…Apparently a lot of people. Last month the site attracted about 125,000 visitors and closed an investment round of $11 million from VCs, according to an article in the New York Times earlier this week. Maybe I’m just more cautious of my personal information after working with IT security companies for the past several years.
Ironically, news broke earlier this week that because of Blippy, people’s credit card numbers are now available on Google. All you do is enter a simple query, “site:blippy.com +”from card”,” and voila, you get credit card numbers of Blippy users. ReadWriteWeb has a good screen grab:
Blippy describes itself as a “fun and easy way to see and discuss what everyone is buying.” Users enter their credit card information, and then Blippy automatically sends out short, public “blips” of information about their purchases — including the prices of the items and where they were bought. In the lead up to his interview with Blippy co-founder Phillip Kaplan, CNN reporter John Sutter explains the site as the “financial version of Twitter.”
Blippy is just a string of Web start ups to launch within the past couple of years that allows people to share personal information about themselves. There’s Foursquare to alert people of your precise location, TripIt to share travel information, Skimble to track and share all of your sports activities, etc. Whatever the reason, they’re all – including Blippy – designed to make people feel and be better “connected.”
It’s interesting to think about how and in what ways the Web’s openness will continue to evolve. One thing’s for sure though – such privacy issues are not going away any time soon in the consumer or enterprise space.
What are your thoughts? Would you use Blippy? And if you use any of the other sites I’ve mentioned, what are your experiences?
This post was first published By Juliana Allen on March Communications’ blog, PR Nonsense, and may be viewed here.
