blippy
blippy shows its own funding on blippy. and now everyone can see. – techcrunch
blippy is an online platform that allows users to share graphics interchange format files. blippy is a private company. blippy has received a total of $ 12. 8m in funding. blippy has 5 followers on owler .
a blippy spokesperson agreed with us yesterday that these kinds of privacy mistakes are a
nightmare scenario
for blippy .
owler has collected 9 screenshots of blippy' s website since oct 2012. the latest blippy website design screenshot was captured in nov 2015 .
blippy currently has 387 fans on facebook. as of july 2013 blippy had 114 fans. that' s a 239 percent increase in 4 years
blippy raised almost $ 13 million in funding and at some point its valuation was at $ 46. 2 million, with enviable investor david hornik posting his $ 8 million dollar purchase of blippy stock on blippy itself .
there is certainly an issue with how blippy collects data – by storing user credentials on their own servers. but blippy says they use apis to log users in when available. and that may be the issue amazon has with blippy .
update: blippy has explained how the credit card numbers ended up in google .
just downloaded @ blippy and been sitting here for like 30 mins just swiping .
since blippy was founded in 12 / 2009, it has participated in 2 rounds of funding. in total blippy has raised $ 12. 8m. blippy' s last funding round was on apr 2010 for a total of $ 11. 2m
blippy currently has 4, 141 followers on twitter. as of july 2013 blippy had 4, 803 followers. that' s a 13 percent decrease in 4 years
my new @ blippy keyboard' s got me over here like... urltoken
i was already good at texting. going to be ridiculous with @ blippy! urltoken
the owler community has estimated the revenue of blippy to be less than $ 1m .
google didn' t put the credit card numbers of four blippy users on the internet, but its search technology failed to detect that blippy had fixed a problem in february .
today someone discovered a google search that displays the credit card numbers of 4 blippy users .
blippy users who share their credit card and bank account information do so with the assumption that this information will remain private. blippy addresses security concerns with the following statement on its website :
cofounder philip kaplan first mentioned that amazon had turned off blippy’s access to the service on an episode of twist with jason calacanis. i spoke to kaplan tonight about amazon’s reaction to blippy .
none of the other thirteen companies blippy takes data from have complained, kaplan says. and he notes that users must actually request data to be collected before blippy begins to do that .
“so should i put rip blippy in the headline of this post? ” i asked kumar “no. when people say blippy i still associate blippy with the company, and not the domain or the product that’s on the domain, ” he replied, optimistic about the company’s new direction whatever it may be. for the record kumar hasn’t shared a review on blippy for over a month .
and then in april of last year google search results revealed that credit card numbers of a few blippy users, and the resulting media spiral unsurprisingly caused a huge spike in blippy traffic but tainted the service with an aura of mistrust. despite blippy’s sincere apology many rushed to delete their accounts .
blippy is an online platform that allows users to share graphics interchange format files. blippy was founded in 12 / 2009. blippy' s headquarters is located in palo alto, california, usa 94306. it has raised 12. 8m in 2 rounds. the latest round was in ap ...
i made @ dominiquecleste download @ blippy sooo best believe all our conversations will now be in gifs only .
blippy co - founder philip kaplan is also putting his money where his mouth is and investing. the fact that charles river ventures is leading the round should surprise no one since kaplan left his role there as an entrepreneur in residence to help launch blippy. crv’s saar gur is also taking a seat on blippy’s board .
omg... new blippy lets you post gifs to twitter. now that was easy! :) urltoken
the credit card numbers of four blippy users were available to anyone on the internet for more than two months .
blippy acknowledged that it should not have exposed raw data containing credit card numbers to the internet in february, when it was working on the site. but google confirmed that its search bots should have noticed that blippy had removed that raw data promptly when its crawling technology made its next pass across blippy' s site, which may have never happened .
researchers from cyveillance are calling the recently launched
twitter of personal service
blippy, a
spear phisher' s dream
due to the real - time purchasing history shared by its users. does blippy really pose a security risk ?
with the help of an sai reader, we found blippy was still making at least one debit card number available to scamsters google searching for the terms
site: blippy. com + outstanding .
we' ve pasted a screenshot below .
still, we recommend these people google their blippy account and make sure nothing they don' t want exposed is exposed .
added @ blippy to my phone so now have no reason to do anything but text gifs. all. day. 4eva .
ready for another gif keyboard for ios 8? blippy has returned today with a new app that lets you crea ...
kaplan also notes that a number of startups are already using protected accounts on blippy to share their expenses with others in the company .
and yes, blippy is working on an iphone app. and while there is no open api yet, they’re considering that too .
after blippy exposed credit card numbers in early february, google' s search crawlers failed to detect that it had scrubbed its site .
given the breach, we suggest that blippy users who have authorized the site to access their debit or credit transactions take immediate action to revoke access. we' ve e - mailed blippy, notified of them of the situation and will update this post when we know more .
people love blippy. well, they love to talk about blippy. and complain about it. and argue that it’s the end of privacy as we know it. but some people do actually love blippy, the service which lets you share you credit card transactions with the world. in fact, a number of investors do, as the service has just raised a $ 1. 6 million round of funding .
but it did not realize in february that one particular bank, fifth third bank, based in cincinnati, also sent the actual credit card numbers of its users along with that purchase data. blippy co - founder and ceo ashvin kumar said blippy had no idea that this data had been exposed until friday morning. he said no other bank used with the blippy service appeared to send credit card numbers along with the rest of the data .
according to ceo ashvin kumar, and depending on what analytics service you’re using, blippy traffic would spike whenever press would cover it and then subsequently die down to levels that showed no signs of steady growth. a trip to blippy meant that you’d see your friends, but they were like bizarre versions of your friends that never did anything. i signed up for blippy and didn’t share one teensy eensy purchase. but the site was innocuous enough .
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 .
sometimes he relies on the tiny blippy noises for percussion, but in places he uses a drummer as well, playing thrashing solos over the electronics .
still, other companies like netflix and apple were willing to let customers link their online accounts to blippy. so are there other factors at play ?
when you sign up to blippy, you choose which services to want blippy to access. chose itunes, and blippy will log what you buy and how much you spend. you can chose whether to make that transaction private, or whether to make it public with an anonymised price. that kind of information is fairly benign and no more revealing than saying which app you liked, or how much you might have spent on a t - shirt from threadless. informally, those kind of statements are published in their thousands on twitter, and blippy formalises that by publishing transaction history at source .
kumar also told me that the blippy team has stopped innovating upon blippy, and has moved on to other products in the social ecommerce space, but that it isn’t ready to reveal anything publicly yet, “we’re basically taking the things that we learned from blippy and applying it to a new set of projects. all of them which are in the early stages, ” kumar said. the crazy connected investors behind the project are super supportive he said .
but it doesn’t explain why they’re insisting blippy delete historical data that’s already been collected. the users have given their permission, and in fact have indicated that they want this data to be moved to blippy. and it is the users’ data, after all. amazon would be smart to remember that .
the social buying site blippy is part of what one might call the internet’s “ too much information movement, ” which i write about in friday’s paper .
blippy, the social network for people who want to publicize their purchases, got in big trouble yesterday for publishing some of its users credit card numbers. but by mid - afternoon, blippy had announced the problem was taken care of and that the situation was
a lot less bad than it looks .
with fraudsters actively crawling web 2. 0 services (spammers harvesting emails from twitter - in real time) for data to be later on integrated in targeted attacks, the detailed and publicly obtainable financial data on blippy can come handy if they manage to solve a simple problem - obtaining the emails of blippy users .
even apple copied it, taking the concept of purchase sharing over to its (also failed) social music service ping. but underneath all the sloppy kisses it seems like people were more in love with the blippy concept (and the irony of its association with charismatic fuckedcompany founder philip kaplan) than the blippy practice .
a series of gaffes at blippy, google, and a midwest bank exposed the credit card numbers of four individuals within google search results for more than two months .
he says they didn’t block blippy, but simply insisted that the service stop pulling user purchase data, and erase all historical data they had already collected. they were also summoned to seattle to speak with a “high ranking executive” of the company. blippy complied (with both the summons and the demand to stop accessing user data) .
@ deekay i am obsessed with blippy! the most recent update made it awesomely easy to organize the gif' s i love most. thanks for a great app !
one interesting aspect to these companies is their potentially turbulent relationship with the online retailer amazon. com. for months, amazon actively blocked people from linking their amazon accounts to the blippy site, citing security concerns. blippy recently offered a workaround, asking users to link their gmail accounts, so it can skim their inboxes for amazon receipts .
scary thing is, we don' t expect today' s kerfuffle will actually slow down blippy' s adoption. people just don' t care that much about privacy .
we take security seriously and want to assure blippy users that this was an isolated incident from many months ago in our beta test, and doesn' t affect current users .
alongside the funding news, blippy has another big announcement: they’re opening up to everyone today. you’ll no longer need an invite; simply visit the site and sign up .
a google representative said the company was looking into why its technology did not update its cache of blippy' s pages for more than two months, declining to comment further .
the incident was especially painful for blippy, given that a new york times profile of the company appeared friday morning, highlighting the growth of start - ups like blippy that are designed to share personal information with the world. and the
worst - case scenario
is probably yet to come: although alcott was willing to sign up for the service again friday evening, after blippy had initially removed his account in hopes of preventing any further breaches, he said ,
i' m thinking about talking to a lawyer .
and that model is key. while the site may be controversial right now, the possibilities are interesting. if blippy is able to prove that people don’t mind sharing their purchase data, a number of potential business plans could spring up. affiliate fees are an obvious one, but think about featured vendors, and maybe even blippy credit cards eventually too .
unfortunately it appears that there is a bug in the
administrative, physical and electronic measures
that ensure privacy, as blippy' s security system has been breached in a very public and unfortunate way .
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 .
with the opening up to everyone, blippy will allow you to find your friends on facebook and twitter that are also using the service. but for now, none of your blippy data with flow back to either of those services. that will eventually come, but they’re working on keeping it simple for now, kaplan says. you can probably imagine the uproar when this purchase data starts flowing into your facebook stream .
you might think the problem lies with blippy users being stupid enough to sign up to a site that aims to their financial details on the web, but it' s not quite as black and white as that .
but hopefully he’s taken to heart the real reason blippy didn’t work: sharing purchases with friends doesn’t solve a problem. challenge: try to figure out what problem blippy solves, or for that matter what ping solves or what competitor swipely solved (“we don’t think people want to share their purchases period, ” swipely ceo angus davis told me after his service had pivoted, “i don’t know how to be more emphatic than that. “ )
the problem began when blippy made a few changes to its web site code in early february, inadvertently exposing the raw data that banks send to the service when a credit card user makes a purchase. that data usually includes innocuous data such as time, date, amount, and location of the purchase, and blippy realized that it needed to scrub that data from its site when it discovered that confirmation numbers for airline tickets were exposed .
enter google' s cache. turns out google indexed some of this html, even though it wasn' t visible on the blippy website. and exposed 4 credit card numbers (but a scary 196 search results) .
researchers from cyveillance are calling the recently launched
twitter of personal finance
service - blippy, a
spear phisher' s dream
due to the massive amounts of real - time purchasing history shared by its users .
the reader who spotted this info asked us not to use his name. we asked him if he was associated with blippy or any of its competitors. he told us ,
no connections whatsoever beside being a user .
thus is the story of the failure of blippy, a product that launched in private beta in december of 2009 and that we breathlessly fawned over again, and again, and again and again (and again and again …) .
what about the biggest purchase? $ 15, 789 on a industrial freezer. the average purchase price for things on blippy is $ 42, apparently. with it now open to everyone, it will be interesting to see how that changes .
blippy, the twitter - like service that lets users publish the details of all their purchases, is just a couple of months old. but it already got stephen colbert’s attention (thumbs up). and now it has amazon’s too (thumbs down) .
sharing your credit card and online purchases with friends on the web sounds risky and it is. we' ve just discovered that several credit card transactions shared on social networking site blippy have been exposed — with full credit card numbers included — in google search results .
two of the blippy users affected by the breach - - ryan alcott of benton harbor, mich. , and bradd dantuma of grand rapids, mich. - - confirmed that they were fifth third customers. a fifth third representative did not return a call seeking comment friday .
so why did blippy feel the need to raise $ 1. 6 million? “ there was a lot of interest, ” kaplan says. “ we trust this gets us through at least the next 12 to 18 months. enough time to prove the model, ” he continues .
what did come was the sense (and the whispers and the techcrunch tips) that blippy was over and that it was time to move on. for co - founder philip kaplan this meant stepping down to go make a bunch of silly iphone apps at the end of march, telling pe hub’s connie loizos that blippy was “doing better than most people could do … but it hasn’t, like, exploded into something huge yet. ” which basically meant that traffic had leveled off. and the loss of its figurehead left many, ourselves included, concerned about the service’s future .
well the truth is it doesn’t have much of one. while there are a few rays of hope (blippy gets a lot of traffic from google as it relates to mobile products) there was no clear direction to shine them in. said kumar, “the decision was whether to focus blippy on mobile products or try something new and we made the decision that we wanted to try something new… our key product metrics haven’t gone up, we iterated a lot but not enough to create significant user adoption, at least not enough to warrant us spending more time on it. ”
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 .
amazon’s security concern is no doubt real. like other big e - commerce sites, it is an alluring target for fraudsters, and it operates a payment system called amazon checkout. it may be worried that hackers could zero in on blippy as a way to get access to its customer’s payment information .
after they saw the venturebeat story, blippy executives attempted to remove the data from google via its webmaster tools, but they reached out directly to the search giant after realizing that a media frenzy had begun. google purged the information around 11: 20 a. m. pdt friday, it said .
still ,
we have to plan for the worst - case scenario ,
kumar said. google provides tools to webmasters that allow them to flag content that was mistakenly published, and had blippy taken advantage of those tools in february, the world would have likely never learned of the data breach .
the single most practical thing a blippy user can do to undermine these campaigns given the nature of their financially oriented social networking, is to limit the amount of personally identifiable information published at the site. that' s, of course, next to the lack of gullibility when a
perfect timing
phishing campaign reaches you .
we' re not so certain. the very fact that anybody uses blippy, even before this week' s cluster, suggests to us that there are lots of people with very little concern for their privacy. some people would even suggest those types are just being realists, that any sense of privacy on the internet is an illusion anyway .
going forward, blippy has some bigger goals. one of those is working with credit card companies to show all individual purchases. right now, this is hard to do because a lot of vendors don’t provide that information. but plenty are wiling to for an idea like this, where everyone can see what others are actually buying, kaplan says .
for now, blippy is happy with the way things are going. already, the service has some 5, 000 members from its closed - beta. those users have shared over $ 4. 5 million in purchase — and over 100, 000 different purchases, kaplan says. just a few weeks ago they were only at $ 1 million in purchases .
from a fraudster' s perspective, online presence equals touch points to engage - with so much descriptive and personally identifiable data that users leave in order to build their online presence, such as full names and personal blogs where contact details can be found, a potential fraudster doesn' t even need to engage in dictionary attacks. a simple test with a random blippy user that appears to be a frequent purchaser of high value items, made it possible to find his personal blog, where he had naturally published all of his contact details. this was made possible due to the fact that he included a relevant picture of himself, which was also visible on his personal page, next to the user' s full name also published at blippy .
blippy, barely six months old, recently raised $ 11. 2 million from the silicon valley venture capital firms august capital and charles river ventures. “we think that many things used to be private only because there was no way to share them, ” says one of its founders, philip kaplan, offering what might be the rallying cry for the over - sharing movement .
if customers start publishing their amazon purchase history on sites like blippy and swipely, other retailers could peek at that data and take away amazon’s edge. and if purchasing data indeed becomes portable across the web, one day, a competitor like wal - mart could ask users if they want to import all their amazon purchase data to generate better recommendations. again, bad news for amazon .
we sincerely apologize to this user. we' ve reached out to him and will do what it takes to make sure he is minimally affected. we have also reached out to google and have asked them to re - index that page and the rest of their cache of the blippy website. as with the issue yesterday, the page in question is a 2 - month old page on blippy that temporarily displayed a users credit card number, which was erroneously sent by his bank as the name of a merchant, in the html source. it should have never happened and we take full responsibility. i just spoke with a google representative and informed them of the situation. google is cooperative and moves quickly - - i expect the probably will be taken care of soon
a providence, r. i. , company has a similar idea. it’s called swipely and is led by a veteran of netscape and tellme, angus davis. that site is still in private beta, so we can’t say how it will distinguish itself from blippy, although mr. davis promises “a real service that my mom and millions of people can use every day to improve their lives. ”
tipster trey copeland wrote to us with a link to results for the search: site: blippy. com +
from card
. that search returns results showing detailed purchase information for transactions. each result highlights that there was a
debit card transaction
or
card transaction ,
the amount spent, the specific location (address included) and the full card number (as seen below) .
“one of the reasons we switched to reviews was to increase user engagement, but that hasn’t really increased either, “ kumar told me resigned, revealing that blippy has 100k registered users and that 30% have shared a purchase — numbers that are not spectacular. the service never had a clear business model, just an attitude of “get user adoption and we’ll figure it out later. ” but later never came .
the potential for abusing blippy (phishing experiment sneaks through all anti - spam filters) as a tool for building spear phishing (targeted attacks) is pretty evidence due to the real - time sharing of purchasing history. but would phishers really bother embracing such a time - consuming approach compared to the well - proven business model of mass - marketing, localization and segmentation of the harvested emails for more accurate reaching of prospective customers ?
well there is, and it' s called blippy. it has some seriously high - profile backers - not least twitter co - founder evan williams, serial entrepreneur jason calacanis and sequoia capital. it' s clear this is a business idea that makes sense, and its string of investors can easily see where the money bit begins. consequently the site just announced $ 11. 2m in funding, announced in a new york times story .
the site accidentally published raw data in the site' s html code for half a day in february. they had thought that data was harmless until someone noticed airline confirmation numbers in it, so they patched the problem... and until last friday when venturebeat found the card numbers, blippy hadn' t realised that google had indexed the site during that half day
which effectively extended a half day exposure into a three month exposure
.
event - based social engineering campaigns - with every purchase that a blippy user makes automatically featured on their accounts, based on the service / credit cards linked to it, this event presents a window of opportunity for the fraudster which is now aware what you' ve just purchased, from which company and the exact amount of the purchase. based on this data, a targeted phishing campaign can be launched, with personalization rarely seen in a mass - marketing phishing campaign .
finance tools aren' t a new idea; urltoken and urltoken are great, for example, but are private financial management tools. that said, think about how much information we share about ourselves now that we would have been horrified about even a few years ago. taping' social spending' is far too lucrative to be killed off and - once it has scaled the huge challenge of building consumer trust - blippy and dozens of rivals will become a permanent part of the social media landscape .
blippy is very concerned about safeguarding the confidentiality of your personally identifiable information. we employ administrative, physical and electronic measures designed to protect your information from unauthorized access. we will make any legally - required disclosures of any breach of the security, confidentiality, or integrity of your unencrypted electronically stored personal data to you via email or conspicuous posting on the services in the most expedient time possible and without unreasonable delay, consistent with (i) the legitimate needs of law enforcement or (ii) any measures necessary to determine the scope of the breach and restore the reasonable integrity of the data system .
i' m game for giving most social networks and tools a try because i want to understand them, and see if they offer a genuine benefit. with twitter, that benefit was obvious quite quickly, while other services take a while to warm to. and then there' s those that just don' t feel right - that' s where blippy' s at. i don' t think people are ready to overcome that big counter - intuitive hurdle of sharing their financial data, and this kind of balls up is the worst possible thing that could happen to them in one way, though of course it will force them to improve their security .
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so it turns out that almost nobody wants people to check out their purchases. and also that just adding a social element to a feature isn’t enough to make it useful. the lessons of user adoption are sometimes learned the hard way .
“imagine being able to see everything your friends buy with a credit card as they do it, ” mg wrote. “this not only tells you what kind of things they’re actually into (rather than someone just saying they like something), but also other information like how cheap they are, as well as where they actually are at a given time. ”
things eventually quieted down as they are wont to do in media hype land. and then we kind of stopped writing about it, caught up in the hockey stick growth of groupon and facebook and quora. we stopped writing about it so much so that we missed the fact that it pivoted from a purchase sharing site to a user reviews site, starting with the introduction of user reviews on july 23 rd 2010 and then moving fully on to reviews by october of the same year .
all three went up against the number one rule in the startup ecosystem, “make something that people want. ” and lost .
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, the social network for weirdos people who want to broadcast to their credit card activity, accidentally published some of its users' credit card numbers .
while it looks super - scary and certainly sucks for those few people who were affected, and is embarrassing to us, it' s a lot less bad than it looks .
raw data is typically harmless. but it turns out that some credit cards (4 out of thousands in this case) show the credit card number in the raw data. for example ,
quiznos inc store # 1234 from card 4444... .
while we take this very seriously and it is a headache for those involved, it' s important to remember that you' re never responsible if someone uses your credit card without your permission. that' s why it' s okay to hand your credit card over to waiters, store clerks, and hundreds of other people who all have access to your credit card numbers .
we' re making efforts to bolster our security to ensure that nothing like this ever happens again. that includes third - party security audits, and in general being a lot more careful before new features are released, even if it' s during a small, limited beta test period .
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urltoken
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the large angel round was led by charles river ventures. also participating are sequoia capital, evan williams, jason calacanis, james hong, ariel poler, and ron conway. a pretty impressive list .
the service recently added a bunch of new online stores and services such as threadless, netflix, and groupon. these services cannot only show how much you spent, but also what you specifically bought. for example, on threadless you can see individual shirts you’ve bought .
kaplan also shared a humorous unofficial competition going on throughout the site. apparently, a number of users are trying to make the smallest purchase possible (above free). right now, the winner was able to buy one tootsie roll with a credit card, for $ 0. 03 .
issue, and is hoping to come to some agreement with the company to allow them to access data in the future. he says
“we believe our users feel strongly, as we do, that it is their right to access and use their data however they want. we’re optimistic that amazon will come to the same conclusion. ”
perhaps, and i’m speculating here, there’s a reason amazon doesn’t want all this data published. they’ve engaged in variable pricing in the past to test the demand curve, for example. they certainly may be using it again .
the start - up, based in palo alto, calif. , allows people to link their credit cards and e - commerce accounts to its site, so those people can share with friends and strangers everything they buy — from dinner at a local restaurant to their cosmetic surgery .
here’s one possible theory. data about its customers’ buying history is one of amazon’s secret weapons – the way it knows to recommend, say, a blu - ray player to someone just bought an hdtv or has begun amassing a movie collection .
or the online retailer might simply be planning its own take on social e - commerce. its acquisition of zappos last year clearly brought some social smarts to the amazon family .
it' s the question most marketing tools try to answer, and there has been plenty of attention give to extracting this information in various forms from the activity on social networks. wouldn' t it be easier if people just said how much they' d spent, and where ?
one problem though; the credit card details of five users were found on google last week .
the guys behind the site have spent two frantic days fixing the problem - no doubt after being giving a dressing down by their new investors - and carefully explained the problem on the company blog and detailed a series of cock ups by them and by google, thoug they did point out google sorted the problem swiftly .
worse, the fifth third bank had sent credit card numbers along with that raw transaction data - hence those credit card numbers sitting on the publicly searchable web for three months, if you knew where to look .
the service - which is still only four months old - has just a handful of partners for now, including netflix, threadless, blockbuster and ebay .
but it takes things a stage further. the next level is a bit more weighty, giving users the option of adding their bank url and login details, and / or credit card details .
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rational people would assume that two days of publishing user' s credit card and debit card numbers would be death blow for a social network designed for people who want to publish the purchasing history .
i just don' t want problems with authorities because of the credit card numbers or anything. i don' t think its a felony since it' s google publishing this information but i wouldn' t want to worry like the guy who sold the iphone 4g you know !
here' s the screenshot. we' ve blurred out the debit card number in the bottom result .
many who learned of the incident were probably more surprised that something like this hadn' t happened sooner, given the skepticism of many about internet privacy, security, and the wisdom of sharing your economic activity with the world .
kumar thanked google for its prompt response friday morning and willingness to admit that something went wrong with its crawling technology. the card numbers were not visible on yahoo or bing on friday morning using the same type of search that produced the numbers on google .
updated 11: 25 p. m. pdt: late friday, google asked to clarify its position on indexing and inadvertantly posted content .
while we always want to serve our users with the freshest possible information, fundamentally it is webmasters' responsibility to request removal from our cache when they make a mistake ,
the company said in a statement .
be respectful, keep it clean and stay on topic. we delete comments that violate our policy, which we encourage you to read. discussion threads can be closed at any time at our discretion .
here' s are some sample scenarios that cybercriminals can easily take advantage of .
calculate the biggest spender based on publicly obtainable data - since quality assurance is now becoming an inseparable part of the cybercrime ecosystem (spammers go multilingual, use automatic translation services; localizing cybercrime - cultural diversity on demand part two; managed polymorphic script obfuscation services), cybercriminals can basically aggregate all the data of prospective victims, and calculate who' s the biggest online spender based on the purchasing history. due to their frequent, and high value purchases, these individuals easily turn into prospective victims .
, where an actual human being will act as the live support attempting to obtain more data from the victim. despite the personalization offered, it undermines the large scale mass marketing campaigns from which phishers derive their profit .
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blippy was a social media sharing site operated from palo alto , california by a company of the same name , for users to post and follow each other 's updates about their purchases of goods and services . it has been described as the " twitter of personal finance " , and is often compared with twitter because it is based on that company 's open sharing model . one purpose of the site is to facilitate discussion and comparison shopping among people who are connected with each other online . as of july , 2010 , blippy primarily focused on social sharing of product and service reviews . the blippy service was shut down as of may 2011 . 
blippy was a social media sharing site operated from palo alto, california by a company of the same name, for users to post and follow each other's updates about their purchases of goods and services. it has been described as the " twitter of personal finance ", and is often compared with twitter because it is based on that company's open sharing model. one purpose of the site is to facilitate discussion and comparison shopping among people who are connected with each other online. as of july, 2010, blippy primarily focused on social sharing of product and service reviews. the blippy service was shut down as of may 2011.
blippy was a social media sharing site operated from palo alto, california by a company of the same name, for users to post and follow each other's updates about their purchases of goods and services. it has been described as the " twitter of personal finance ", and is often compared with twitter because it is based on that company's open sharing model. one purpose of the site is to facilitate discussion and comparison shopping among people who are connected with each other online. as of july, 2010, blippy primarily focused on social sharing of product and service reviews. the blippy service was shut down as of may 2011.