mandag 26. april 2010

Mint founder Aaron Patzer makes a slight jab at Blippy’s privacy woes

Aaron Patzer, the founder of personal finance startup Mint, made a slight jab at beleaguered Blippy today. Blippy is a startup that lets people share details of purchases they’ve made with their friends, and it recently came under fire after credit card numbers of a few users showed up in Google searches.
“I don’t get enough value out of something like Blippy,” Patzer said at the Future of Money conference in San Francisco. “I also think the better thing to do is to use aggregated anonymous statistics.”
He added: “I don’t like getting questions about my purchases at lingerie shops. What I wear is my own business.”
Last week, a tipster discovered that credit card numbers of a handful of Blippy users were showing up in Google searches. The bad news came just a day after the startup, which allows people to share their credit-card purchases, said it raised $11.2 million in new funding at a $46.2 million valuation.
Blippy has since announced a multi-pronged effort to shore up security. It’s hiring a chief security officer to focus solely on issues relating to information security. It’s also pledging to have external auditors look at its technical infrastructure, control caching of information in search engines and create a security and privacy center.
As part of damage control, Blippy had been working with Google to remove the URLs containing credit card numbers and all snippets and caches related to Blippy. The company added that the credit card numbers that were exposed were from old purchases and that the company had examined all of the data published to the service since.
Tags: personal finance
Companies: Blippy, mint
People: Aaron Patzer

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