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Kickstarter Leaves Project Ideas Exposed

Posted by Soulskill on from the i-just-had-70,000-great-ideas dept.

netbuzz writes "Crowd-funding startup Kickstarter is taking a public-relations hit today after it was reported that some 70,000 not-yet-public project ideas were left exposed on the company's Web site for more than two weeks. Kickstarter insists that no financial information was compromised and that only a few dozen of the projects were actually accessed. 'Obviously our users' data is incredibly important to us, the company said in a blog post. 'Even though limited information was made accessible through this bug, it is completely unacceptable.'"

3 of 56 comments (clear)

  1. At least Kickstarter don't make a living from it.. by dryriver · · Score: 4, Interesting

    When Facebook exposes the private data of tens of millions of its users to the Internet, nothing happens. Nothing gets investigated. Nobody is held responsible. Nobody goes to jail, or somesuch. In fact, the market value of Facebook only goes up as a result of it exposing more and more data to its commercial partners and the internet at large. ----- Kickstarter accidentally leave a few WIP funding projects exposed to API users? Ooooh, that's so terrible! Ooooh, that's so wrong! ------- In the age of Facebook, which Julian Assange quite accurately called "the most abominable spying machine created in human history", a little slip-up like this shouldn't even make the news. -------- Kickstarter is a genuinely useful website. I hope it stays that way.

    --
    Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
  2. The real story is... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Based on our research, the overwhelming majority of the private API access was by a computer programmer/Wall Street Journal reporter who contacted us.

    "Computer programmer/Wall Street Journal reporter"? Who knew that such a beast existed?

  3. Ideas are a Dime a Dozen - Issue fixed by pubwvj · · Score: 3, Interesting

    1. Kickstarter fixed it. Good for them.

    2. Nobody was harmed in the making of this joke.

    3. Ideas are freely available on Kickstarter. They do make that point. If you can't stand your ideas being known don't Kickstart them.

    We are building a nano-scale on-farm USDA meat processing facility for our farm. We're using Kickstarter to fund it in part (see http://smf.me/ for details - tomorrows the last day May 15th). I'm open sourcing it. Go see my blog and see the floor plan, read about all the neat things we've developed to make it more energy efficient, smaller, lower cost and useful. If you want to do the same thing then more power to you. Share ideas.

    -Walter Jeffries
    Sugar Mountain Farm
    http://sugarmtnfarm.com/