Lovable apps expose passport details and more than 200K private messages

Igor here, Head of Security at Lovable. Thanks to the Crissy Field team for their work. The root cause in these apps was insufficent Row-Level Security, which is exactly what our scanning is built to catch. We scan every app automatically before publish and offer a deeper SAST scan, both free for all users. When we flag findings, users can select “Fix” and Lovable will help resolve them. They can also enable auto-fix, which resolves security findings in the background, and block publishing entirely when there are critical findings.

When an app has end users, security is a key part of the product. That’s why we keep investing in making security tools better and easier to use, taking on as much of the security load as we can and fixing more issues automatically.

I personally believe that making security accessible is what leads to making software accessible. We’re committed to both.

You can read more about our approach: https://lovable.dev/blog/find-it-fix-it-ship-it

Hi, I’m the author of this blog post. I submitted it to HN two weeks ago, but it didn’t gain much traction, so I’m glad to see it resubmitted. Happy to answer any questions, though I think the situation is fairly self-explanatory.

The part people are ignoring is Supabase's culpability in this matter: https://github.com/orgs/supabase/discussions/4547

This was supposedly fixed on October 30, but there are reports floating around that for existing projects, the defaults still apply.

Lovable deserves some heat for using this, but this was a choice that was made by Supabase many years ago to support making it easier to onboard potential customers, a deliberate tradeoff of less onboarding pain for less security.

These are canaries in the colemines. Platforms need better defaults, deny-by-default DBs, least-priviledge API, automated auth tests, etc. Basically make insecure deployments difficult with AI generated code.

One might argue that data breaches been there way before AI, the difference with these AI generated apps is:

- They are an easy target, they don’t need any sophisticated hacking knowledge (article mentions inspecting network calls in browsers).

- There tons of those, and more created everyday. For the average user, they don’t know what they are using, or how risky it can be.

It's incredible how little understanding the average person has about data, privacy, and security.

Allowing anyone to build and host a public app without a basic understanding of these things is like letting people fly a passenger plane without a license.

I cannot wrap my head around jacquesm's insistence that this is a breach.

Can someone please correct me if I'm wrong here, but isn't the article claiming that all data was publicly accessible with a read-only API key, also publicly shipped in each site?

Unless I'm missing something, no amount of digging into *published* data is a breach of anything. The act of publishing it is the leak, not the consumption.

Am I losing the plot?

Railway got hit by pretty much this a few days ago. Attacker likely used abliterated models, stolen keys, ~$740k in AI charges. If it happens to them, random Lovable apps are easy targets.

I was gathering evidence and it's such a pleasure it's on frontpage! some details if anyone interested https://digitaliziran.si/2026/11/14/the-controller-is-whoeve...

Even less incentive for people to pay startups

Seeing as this is reported by a German organisation about a Swedish company: has this been filed with the authorities under the GDPR? Any details on whether (national) data protection authorities have picked it up and warned the companies and people in violation?

One of the golden rule of webdev is "never build your own auth" for a reason.

To me, it feels like Lovable is an irresponsible product selling the idea that web development is trivial now with LLMs, where the reality is that although it's true that agentic coding means while anybody can spin up a website in like 10 minutes, a professional software engineer who knows what they are doing can still utilize LLMs much more effectively than an amateur ever could.

At least with "lovable", people knew what they were getting into when they sent their PII to an AI slopped project.

But unfortunately, it’s not always this transparent. In the US, doctors (particularly PE owned ones) often use AI in their backend in one form or the other. In one case, I observed their transcription service was using some LLM to help process data into medical record.

In other cases, your data may even be processed/leaked/trained without your explicit consent through a third party vendor that doesn’t interact directly with doctors office (physician office -> order sent to pharmacy -> pharmacy uses LLM to process data).

This is at least the case for the insidious CVS/Caremark conglomerate.

makes me wonder if Retool’s governance focused message is valid

How can they make such a mistake? Surely theyre such a big company, like how does this slip by?

i think this is old news tho.

I wonder what will stop or at least force this wave of individual creators to think a bit further. If I leak data at my job it's a massive deal. Like stop working, start calling people and light a cigarette type deal.

Like mentioned elsewhere in this thread, there are doctors vibe coding shite and sending private medical data to Anthropic's servers, probably without even checking the "don't use for training lol" checkbox. Thousands of passports, invoices, whatever, are rn available on the open internet. People posting private company data on PUBLIC github repos (dealt with 2 such cases lol).

These individuals aren't held to the same standards, and right now nobody is enforcing the rules on them.

And maybe that's fine. Maybe we don't want to stifle innovation. But if my passport ends up on the dark web and I get identity theft'd, then I'd be pissed. There are REAL consequences.

> 24,664 websites sent database records from Supabase as soon as they loaded, without requiring a login or any other interaction.

Oh boy, open season on those entry points

Who uses lovable lol. Hire someone you can sue if need be to make your websites.

This is what happens if you let a non expert (or someone with little experience) build you an app with AI.

If your app processes personal info, even if it's just a "sign up with your email to keep updated" list on a landing page, it needs proper security

Why do I only ever hear about Supabase in the context of people getting fucked?

Folks are blaming AI, and that's certainly part of it (folks without knowledge and experience can now build polished apps, though there were still plenty of "WTF" security breaches before AI), but I feel like the only thing that can fix this are real, stiff liability consequences.

The defects listed in this report didn't require some complicated 0-day exploit chain - they were just sensitive data stored without any authentication at all, in a database that anyone with Internet access can view. In other words, it would be the equivalent of a company like Public Storage leaving all of its storage units with no locks on them at all.

Affected users should be able to sue for a lot in these basic security failures. And obviously for many of these small websites, the potential damages would quickly bankrupt the site owners, but that's the point. People would think a lot more carefully about how they protect sensitive data if there were real negative consequences for their failures.

Nothing to see here and working as intended.

Imagine frontier abliterated models running at 2,400 TPS finding all these issues rapidly on web apps like this.

You are not ready security-wise when these models get faster. ("Formal verification" won't save you either)

I can't state my disdain enough for the rabid, careless advancement of AI, and all the bros that keep telling me to catch up or fall behind, while they are actively causing harm to the hundreds of thousands, or millions of users they have, without care or consideration.

Nearly two decades of experience learning how to build safe, performant software, to be replaced by this shit.

We don't care about people, our customers anymore. We actively harm them for profit. This is such a garbage industry now.

[dead]

[dead]

[flagged]

[dead]

[flagged]

[dead]