By Mark Evans
Confession: I’m a social media junkie – an enthusiastic blogger, active Twitter user, reluctant member of the ever-growing Facebook empire, and YouTube watcher. I like to share my thoughts and interesting content and online services.
The chances, however, of me using Blippy are zero, nil, nadda, nunca.
Why anyone would give a third-party their credit card information so their purchases can be tracked and broadcast is beyond me. Over the past week, I have been beating the drum about the changes that Facebook made to its API that now make more of your information public. Blippy is just another strange part of the “tell-all” ecosystem that has emerged in recent years.
Really, what are the benefits of telling the world about your purchases? Seriously, what’s in it for you, your friends, or strangers?
Is it vanity? Is it a way to provide real-world suggestions about the best products and services to purchase? Is it just another creature of consumerism, which seems to have survived the recession relatively unscathed? Or is Blippy just another beast to feed our growing addiction to sharing?
I’m sure there are people who get some value from Blippy by getting a better idea of what people are buying so they can make better purchasing decisions, but let’s be real here: Blippy’s in the business of collecting massive amounts of data so it can aggregate and leverage it to make money. In other words, your activity fuels the fire.
To me, the common theme between Facebook and Blippy is how the balance between the benefits offered to users, and what these companies get from all their users’ activity, is starting to tilt in the direction of the businesses. While users get a few social media crumbs, Facebook and Blippy are gorging at the data buffet.
By the way, here’s Blippy mea culpa in the wake of reports that some of its users’ credit card information was accidentally disclosed via Google.
Originally posted on markevanstech.com
Blippy is weird. But then I think twittering and sexting are weird. It may just be part of the natural evolution of the hive mind, where every cell in the mind knows everything about every other cell.
For those still shy about exposing their privates of various kinds to everyone, it should be noted that when you register a domain name, you can have the whois info which anyone in world can look up be that of the registrar, not your own. The article linked to by BlippyWatcher in his or her comment makes a big deal of domain names being listed as purchases on Blippy thus allowing bad guys to get the address info of the purchaser, and a link is provided to a google search for people supposedly exposed. When I looked at it, the first person listed used a P.O. Box address, and the second used his registrar’s anonymizer service. That’s becoming quite common.
Something to bear in mind with that, though, is that Godaddy charges a whopping nine bucks for the service. At that point they’re no longer the cheapest registrar, and you might as well use one that includes the service as part of the registration fee, like my favorite, http://register4less.com .
Of course, if you’re a cell in the hive mind none of this matters. When you take over I hope you do a better job than did the previous generations of solo-brainers.
Only criminals and ad servers want to know what Blippy has to offer. Identity theft is the name of the game, and Blippy is in the game deep. $11.2 million deep, so far.
http://blippynews.wordpress.com/the-blippy-guide-to-shelling-out-personal-information-on-the-web-make-a-go-daddy-purchase/