“I don’t like getting questions about my purchases at lingerie shops. What I wear is my own business.” Mint.com founder Aaron Patzer on Blippy, an online service that allows you to share your recent purchases with a network of friends. Blippy has been at the center of a security breach storm that has angered many Blippy customers.
The bottom of that post has a few action items they’re doing, among them this one… “Hire a Chief Security Officer and associated staff that will focus solely on issues relating to information security.”
Um… shouldn’t that have been done before they started gathering sensitive credit card data in the first place?
I agree sharing personal shopping information is not what I would like to do, however for people who don’t mind doing this, there is nothing like this data. This is just pure gold waiting to be mined, the monetization model based on a trend analysis of shopping pattern is one thing that comes to my mind. The other is all investment and savings suggestion also suggestions/promotions on using best financial tools, cards is another area to look at.
Except now he’s admitted to purchasing things at a lingerie shop, so we can’t just not ask questions about them.
+1 to that 😉
The problem is bigger than just this issue of leaked credit card numbers – once people know your transaction they can quickly and easily know a lot more about you than you might think. For example: http://bit.ly/9ZaG12
Two points:
1) What we are seeing here is the difference between direct access to raw data vs. depersonalized, aggregate trend-type data. This may be a case where people would feel more comfortable sharing the “types” of purchases they make rather than the actual full on track 2 data.
2) Blippy offers the function for manual approval of purchase data sharing. There should be a usable way to filter this stream quickly and on the fly. i.e., post transaction I can quickly launch a mobile app and “mute” the next transaction.
For the record, I would share all my lingerie purchases.
Where’s the evidence that “many Blippy customers were angered?” Did you make that part up?
Is that necessary?
Will you be happy if someone shares your credit card details on internet or may be as a fb update…
what is with this pathological need to overshare? pam bought maxipads today. what do you think fellow users?
First thing I thought of when I heard about Pud’s new idea: I am NOT giving him my credit card. Then this happens. Is anyone actually surprised? People were predicting something like this and it happened. Shocker!