Credit.com Chairman and Co-Founder, Adam Levin, was astonished when he learned of Blippy.com, the social networking Web site that allows people to share every purchase they make in real time.
Privacy experts saw the site as yet another disaster in the making in an age of too-much-information. But early adopters embraced it, praising it as a way to share great deals, new products and open up the floor for discussions on spending habits. After all, only users purchase items, price and merchant name would be shared, not sensitive financial data, like credit card numbers.
Then last month, Blippy announced that a technical glitch had exposed "raw data" (which included credit card numbers and purchase details), and Google indexed it, making users' sensitive information available through a search.
This event didn't surprise Levin, who is also the Chairman and Co-Founder of Identity Theft 911, an identity theft resolution and management company. This week, he discusses with Credit.com the perils of oversharing and why the Internet isn't the safe haven that many users mistake it for.
In related news, Identity Theft 911 recently conducted a poll that found that social network users of all ages posted information that can leave them vulnerable to identity theft: 59.6% posted their date of birth; 21% posted their address; 18% posted their travel time; 10.9% posted their mother's maiden name.