How Blippy users’ credit cards got into Google – CNET – NIMBRUNG.NET

After Blippy exposed credit card numbers in early February, Google’s search crawlers failed to detect that it had scrubbed its site.

A series of gaffes at Blippy, Google, and a Midwest bank exposed the credit card numbers of four individuals within Google search results for over two months.

Friday was easily the worst day in the history of Blippy, a young startup that allows people to create social networks around sharing information on goods and services that they buy. VentureBeat discovered that credit-card numbers of four Blippy users could be found in Google’s search index and published a story, forcing the startup’s three founders to scramble to repair the damage and get the numbers removed from Google’s search index.

Blippy acknowledged that it should not have exposed raw data containing credit card numbers to the Internet back 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.

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