Today Philip Kaplan, co-founder of the website Blippy responded to news that Blippy had revealed users' credit card numbers online, which google crawled, indexed and shared with the internets. In this blog post, by Kaplan, we get some real gems.
Kaplan explains that the problem of Blippy revealing users' credit card numbers on the internet is "a lot less bad than it looks". He goes on to explain why it's less bad :
Here Kaplan somehow tries to skirt around the fact that though the "raw" data typically contains harmless data, in this case it contained users' credit card numbers and that the data was put up on the internet.
He continues, trying to somehow explain that the real problem is that Google indexed their site, not that they publicly shared users' credit card numbers. To me this seems like a burglar telling the judge that the one to blame is the snooping neighbour who saw the burglar robbing a house and called the cops. If that damn neighbour had just minded his own business we wouldn't be in this whole snafu.
Kaplan finishes with this winner by explaining how it's ok that his company revealed these users' credit card numbers to everyone on the internet because you and I share our credit card numbers with waiters, clerks and "hundreds of other people" all the time. Wow, he's right. Blippy isn't the bad guy here. The bad buys are google for catching them and revealing their blunder, and every merchant in the world who requires our credit card numbers in order for us to purchase goods. It's so simple.
I'm no expert, but it seems to me that "co-founder a PR expert does not make". I can easily imagine a companies response to a mistake like this which would at the very least not further detract from my trust in that company, but having the founder come on and clarify
- how we're really blowing this out of proportion
- how we should be focussing on what that nefarious google was doing indexing their pages
- and how we broadcast our credit card numbers every day already to all of the merchants that we buy things from
is a complete fail. I'd never heard of Blippy before this. With a more reasonable response in which they took responsibility for what they'd done I can imagine using their service. I can guarantee that I will not ever use their service now though.