Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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.'"

23 of 56 comments (clear)

  1. "Exposed" defined: by Bananatree3 · · Score: 5, Informative
    TFA reads:

    This bug allowed some data from unlaunched projects to be made accessible via the API. It was immediately fixed upon discovering the error. No account or financial data of any kind was made accessible. The bug was introduced when we launched the API in conjunction with our new homepage on April 24, and was live until it was discovered and fixed on Friday, May 11, at 1:42pm. The bug made accessible the project description, goal, duration, rewards, video, image, location, category, and user name for unlaunched projects.

    1. Re:"Exposed" defined: by poetmatt · · Score: 4, Insightful

      So basically as TFA says, the hype is courtesy of the WSJ and vested interests that don't like independent businesses and new startups? Say it ain't so.

  2. I so meta... by x1r8a3k · · Score: 5, Funny

    Maybe they can setup a kickstarter to fund the software improvements.

    1. Re:I so meta... by CastrTroy · · Score: 4, Informative

      Obligatory XKCD.

      --

      Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
    2. Re:I so meta... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The ultimate relevant XKCD, in that it was actually posted today.

    3. Re:I so meta... by nschubach · · Score: 2

      https://www.google.com/#q=recursion

      --
      Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
  3. So many ideas... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Wow, that's like... $7 worth of ideas!

    1. Re:So many ideas... by coinreturn · · Score: 2

      Wow, that's like... $7 worth of ideas!

      At the standard rate of dime/dozen, that's $583.33. But since "only a few dozen were accessed," that's less than a dollar. If the Kickstarter people come to my office, I will reimburse them with a $1.

  4. Revelation by MetalliQaZ · · Score: 4, Insightful

    As I read this I tried to analyze my feelings about this news. I have found that I am completely indifferent. Did someone get to take a look at unpublished, in-progress kickstarter ideas? May be. Does it matter? Not really.

    I suppose that means I should expect the buzz around kickstarter to fade away until it settles into its niche. Sorta like eBay.

    I'm sure one of those 7000 will flip out and try to sue somebody, but it would be meaningless.

    --
    "Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
    1. Re:Revelation by arth1 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      As I read this I tried to analyze my feelings about this news. I have found that I am completely indifferent. Did someone get to take a look at unpublished, in-progress kickstarter ideas? May be. Does it matter? Not really.

      Bear in mind that the US just switched to a "first to file" patent system, and since these projects hadn't hit the open stage yet, they were unpublished and thus not "prior art" unless published elsewhere.

      "Only" dozens were accessed...

    2. Re:Revelation by MetalliQaZ · · Score: 3, Insightful

      This is kickstarter. It is meant for projects, not patents. If they were planning patenting something, they shouldn't have been pumping the details into website that is essentially public. Also, lets face it. If the innovations were so good, they could get funding through traditional channels. (saving up, selling car, mortgaging home, begging friends and family, venture capital firms, private venture capital investments. In that order.)

      -d

      --
      "Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
    3. Re:Revelation by arth1 · · Score: 2

      This is kickstarter. It is meant for projects, not patents. If they were planning patenting something, they shouldn't have been pumping the details into website that is essentially public.

      Well, duh - the kickstarters are unlikely to plan patenting something, that's fairly obvious.

      But the people who scan through kickstarter projects before the projects go public may very well be, in the good old spirit of Edison.
      And when the projects haven't been made public yet, they may very well be patentable by others under the new first-to-file principle.

  5. 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.
  6. Yo dawg by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    I heard you like kickstarters so I put a kickstarter in your kickstarter so you can kickstart while you kickstart.

  7. Relatively quick disclosure by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Discovered and fixed on Friday, publicly disclosed on their blog on Monday. While it's not good that they had this bug in the first place, it's refreshing to see them take responsibility for it and explain it publicly and promptly.

  8. 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?

  9. So what? by longacre · · Score: 2

    This is obviously a bug, but if anyone is actually hurt by this, they shouldn't have been posting their idea to Kickstarter in the first place. Markets will not be affected by a pre-production, pre-funding idea becoming public knowledge earlier than it should have: Anyone who could act on such info would have done so when it became live, anyway.

    --
    Airplane Photos, Airline News, Planespotting Guides
  10. Re:At least Kickstarter don't make a living from i by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Until someone pulls off the imminent millionaire scam and flees to Aruba, beyond the reach of any legal system.

    But then we start a Kickstarter project to fund a trip to go after them.

  11. 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/

    1. Re:Ideas are a Dime a Dozen - Issue fixed by Jeng · · Score: 2

      We are building a nano-scale on-farm USDA meat processing facility for our farm.

      I read your kickstarter page and think it's a great idea, but I take it when you use the term nano-scale you aren't actually talking about nano-tech. Buzzwords make me nervous, buzzwords used wrong make me even more nervous.

      Why not just use the word "small"? It's not like you are doing molecular level butchering.

      --
      Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
  12. Re:information wants to be free by marcosdumay · · Score: 2

    Great, now you'll just need some money to kick start them.

    --
    Rethinking email
  13. Re:At least Kickstarter don't make a living from i by makomk · · Score: 2

    They don't need to. Kickstarter takes an entirely risk-free 5% cut of the proceeds of any successful funding campaign, and it's not like they have to pay credit card fees and chargeback fees out of that - those are entirely taken out of the project creator's share of the proceeds - nor do they have to worry about liability for the inevitable Kickstarter-based scams and failures to deliver thanks to some careful disclaimers in their TOS. If you take a look at the amount of money some projects have raised through Kickstarter, that means they have an awful lot of income.

  14. Re:PR hit over this? I can think of better... by QuasiSteve · · Score: 2

    Yes, sorry - I had added links after previewing in a separate tab, but ended up submitting the original.

    So here we go:
    KickStarter: http://www.kickstarter.com/
    IndieGoGo: http://www.indiegogo.com/
    RocketHub: http://www.rockethub.com/

    Mythic: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/273246798/mythic-the-story-of-gods-and-men
    Projektor: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1747147409/projektor-make-your-mobile-devices-larger-than-lif

    KickStarter Mobile Phone App project: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/128239212/kickstarter-mobile-phone-app
    GloSpex (original): http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1816244302/glospex
    Go GloSpex (resubmit): http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1816244302/go-glospex

    Double Fine adventure: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/66710809/double-fine-adventure
    Pebble: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/597507018/pebble-e-paper-watch-for-iphone-and-android

    Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/

    Javascript timer with now-blank divs that once housed actual server-written content - view any project page source, look for "ksr_page_timer". The divs that follow once contained server-written data (e.g. "44 hours left") - which needn't have been removed for the javascript timer to work.

    xkcd comic: http://xkcd.com/1055/

    Quirky: http://www.quirky.com/

    Note that the example projects mentioned were but a few. There's so many more that would stand out as examples of things where better screening, intervention, communication and combinations of the aforementioned would have been thoroughly welcome and easily serve as material that could cause a 'PR hit' than the subject matter of TFA.