There’s an app for snooping on your friends, family and colleagues to find out about their fancy dinners, the people they date and the parties they attend without you being invited.
It is not a social networking app like Facebook or Snapchat. It’s Venmo, the app that became popular more than a decade ago by allowing people to send mobile payments to each other and post those transactions, often in the form of cute emoji, on a public timeline.
Snooping works the other way around, too. Even if you rarely use Venmo now, the app is likely releasing sensitive information about you to the general public.
How can I know? I’m embarrassed to admit this, but I recently discovered that my contacts list, which includes the names of people in my phone book, is published on Venmo for anyone using the app to see.
That’s because more than a decade ago, Venmo made it possible for its users to see people’s contact lists. It created the option to hide the address book only two years ago, long after I stopped using the app.
Venmo is a strong example of how even as social norms change in the ways we use technology, companies and their apps don’t change much. Venmo was founded in 2009 as a music start-up that allowed users to buy songs from bands via a text message. When the time comes It was acquired by eBay in 2013it has become a mobile wallet service trending among younger people who are gung-ho about sharing information about themselves online.
At the time, social networking was novel, and posting your thoughts, moves and successes for all to see was very cutting edge, not bad. Since then, we’ve learned the hard way that sharing such seemingly innocuous information can be dangerous. Stalkers, employers or data brokers can use the data to analyze our whereabouts and activities to target us.
But Venmo remains an app with a strong social networking element, one of many in a generation of apps now nearly 15 years old. And if you’ve had apps and internet accounts since then that were on autopilot, it’s best to revisit them periodically to check their settings so you can protect your privacy. If you no longer see value in the service, the safest bet may be to delete the account.
Before we get into that, let’s take a look at why Venmo remains a privacy concern and what to do to protect your data.
Venmo Transactions
In the early 2010s, when smartphones took off, Venmo rode the coattails of companies like Facebook and Twitter, bringing the concept of a public timeline into the mainstream. Similar to those networks, Venmo allowed people to publicly post to a feed, in this case the details of payment transactions, including the dollar amount, time, date and a description, such as pizza or taxicab emoji.
At the time, Braintree, the payments company that bought Venmo in 2012 before it was bought by eBay, said that Venmo had created “worthy experiences” to simplify mobile payments between smartphone users. (Venmo is now owned by PayPal, which was spun off from eBay in 2015.)
Venmo has made several changes over the years to protect the privacy of its users. In 2021, it disabled its global feed, a stream where users can see Venmo transactions with strangers.
But critics say the app still falls short. Now, you can see transactions with people who are not your friends if you visit their profiles.
Venmo is still set by default to share publicly when you receive or pay. There is an option to make the transaction private, but if you use the app quickly and overlook the setting, you may accidentally broadcast payments between you and others.
“I didn’t just go out for pizza with this guy,” said Gennie Gebhart, a managing director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights nonprofit. “It’s a pattern of who you live with, interact with and do business with, and how that changes over time.”
Last month, The Guardian discovered that through a Venmo feed an aide for Justice Clarence Thomas collects the fees from lawyers who had business with the Supreme Court, a potential conflict of interest. The aide has since hidden his Venmo activity from public view.
While the idea of posting pizza and beer emojis and dollar amounts may seem like a fun way to tell others you’re out and about, there may be consequences. Those transactions can be used to analyze your movements or, in Justice Thomas’ case, inadvertently reveal relationships.
In 2017, Hang Do Thi Duc, a data researcher in Mozilla Foundation, published Public by Default, an interactive graphic that summarizes the intimate details scraped from 208 million Venmo transactions. The graphic comes from the daily lives of several Venmo users, including a cannabis dealer, a food cart vendor and a couple who split bills and pay off debt together.
Venmo said in a statement that it has worked to change its privacy measures for customers and that privacy settings can be controlled within its app. “The privacy and safety of all Venmo users is always a top priority,” the company said.
To prevent your daily life from being broadcast on Venmo, be sure to change the settings. Inside the app, click on the Me tab, tap the settings icon and select Privacy. Under default privacy settings, select Private. Then, under the Privacy “More” section, click “Past Transactions” and make sure to set that to “Change All to Private.”
Your Contacts List
Venmo has made the list of contacts, which can be generated from your smartphone’s address book or your Facebook friends list, visible to any other user of the app.
That can make a lot of information public. In 2021, my colleague Ryan Mac, then at BuzzFeed News, used Venmo to discover President Biden’s account and list of personal contacts. Mr. Biden later deleted his Venmo account.
On a personal level, a public address book can reveal a new romantic partner to an ex. For professionals, it can expose a doctor’s patients, a journalist’s resources or a salesperson’s clients.
To hide your contacts list from public view, visit privacy settings, click on Friends List and select Private. Also, toggle off the option for “exit other users’ friend lists.”
Check, Then Check Again
All tech companies change their data sharing features and settings over time. So take a moment to scroll through your phone and check the settings within apps you haven’t used in a while to see if you’ve missed anything.
Ms. Do Thi Duc, now a graphics editor at The New York Times, said he’s not surprised that Venmo is still making headlines, because the app relies on people’s public sharing as a marketing mechanism. He said he deleted his Venmo account after doing his research on the company.
After I wrote this column, I did the same.
