It looks like this is some kind of Google Analytics tracking flaw for a Groupon marketing campaign, and the emails are from people who have referred deals to others through Groupon’s insecure links. It seems as though when someone clicks on a deal link in a Groupon email and posts it anywhere else online, Google has indexed this sensitive information.
Groupon, which launched its service allowing merchants to create their own deals yesterday, looks like it’s suffering some scaling issues along the lines of what happened to purchase sharing startup Blippy when it exposed credit card numbers through Google search results in April.
I have gotten in touch with Google, Groupon and a few of the people with exposed email addresses about the flaw and will update this post when I hear back.
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Authors: Alexia Tsotsis