Another Reason to Be Careful About Your Privacy When Using Social Networking Sites – Credit Card Numbers Exposed

I tend to tell my students a lot that they need to be careful about using social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter, because anything you post about yourself in your profile or any status updates/tweets you make are public and can be read by anyone.

I like to compare this to walking through Times Square while wearing a sandwich board with your latest tweet or status update printed on it. Anyone can read what’s been written, and it’s pretty much inevitable that people will. And even worse than the Times Square analogy, everything you say is recorded for posterity and can be read days, weeks, or years later, so it’s critically important that you are careful about what information you share online.

This latest story just goes to show you how bad it can get — I just was reading on The Consumerist that a relatively new social networking site called Blippy has accidentally shared the credit card numbers of some of their users to the world, and people could find this out by searching on Google!

The entire premise of this Blippy site is about the worst example of a dumb concept for a social networking site I’ve ever seen from a privacy standpoint: the entire concept is you enter your bank or card information and anything you buy is automatically posted on the site and shared with your friends (plus as a bonus, it’s shared with a world full of strangers via Google and other search engines)!

Now in this case, the system is not supposed to publish the actual credit card numbers involved with the purchases, but a glitch caused it to happen with four users’ card numbers.  May not sound like a lot, but it’s a potentially massive problem for those four people!

Even without sharing the actual number, in my opinion it’s a pretty stupid idea to be automatically publishing all of your purchases publicly online — frankly, there’s probably not that many of your friends who are actually interested in the fact that you just bought toilet paper at the Safeway down the street from you, but there are a lot of big corporations who can use your buying habits to  create a profile of you.

Think about the types of things your buying habits can reveal, especially if updated in real time:

• Your gender
• Your age
• Where you live
• When you’re away from home running errands,  or when you’re out of town (inviting burglaries)
• Medical conditions you have
• What kind of pets you have
• Whether you have kids or grandkids

That’s just off the top of my head, but half of those things can be used in one way or another for identity theft or physical theft.

Just another reason to keep in mind how important it is to be careful when using social networking sites or anywhere you might be sharing personal information online.

Posted by Worth Godwin Computer Training on Apr 23, 2010 in Computer Tips, Online Privacy & Security, Social Networking Risks, Tech News | 0 comments