Change Your Venmo Settings to Private Right Now

guest · Jul 18, 2018

Change Your Venmo Settings to Private Right Now
July 17, 2018
https://twocents.lifehacker.com/change-your-venmo-settings-to-private-right-now-1827661833

If you use Venmo and haven’t changed your privacy settings from the default, you may want to rethink that—because it’s fairly simple for pretty much anyone to figure out what you’re doing and track your transactions if you haven’t.

A new report, aptly titled Public By Default, from designer-activist Hang Do Thi Duc, lays out just how easy it is for anyone to view public transactions made on the app. Duc was able to download data on all 207,984,218 public transactions in 2017 by “simply by clicking on a public link,” as you don’t need permission to access Venmo’s API, according to Fast Company.

“It’s normal for users to say, ‘I expect this service to prioritize my privacy,’” Duc told Fast Company. “But in the case of Venmo, you’d be disappointed. They just don’t care about that.”
Click to expand...

mirimir · Jul 18, 2018

That is just so bloody wild. Hey, why hide anything? What could be the harm?

Damn!

__Nikopol · Jul 18, 2018

Crazy... go to that "public link" and change the limit to a higher number. You'll get that amount of transactions, I think.

guest · Jul 20, 2018

Venmo refuses to say why transactions are public by default
207 million transactions are public — and anyone can search them.
July 20, 2018
https://www.zdnet.com/article/venmo-refuses-to-say-why-transactions-are-public-by-default/

Venmo, the mobile payments app, won't say why it exposes users' data to the world whenever they make a transaction.
In other words, everyone can see your transactions -- even without the app.

"I used Venmo's public API to pull in all public transactions of 2017 -- a total of 207,984,218 transactions," he said in an email. "By looking through them, I learned a scary amount about Venmo users. [...]"

We asked Venmo on Thursday why transactions are public by default, and if Venmo will change this policy in the near future, following up from other reporters who asked the same question but received no response.

The company did, however, send out a blanket statement earlier this week, about how it takes the "safety and privacy" of its users seriously.
Except, it doesn't. If Venmo cared, it wouldn't set the default privacy settings to "public."
Click to expand...

__Nikopol · Jul 20, 2018

Vicemo
See who's buying drugs, booze, and s*x on Venmo.
http://www.vicemo.com/

Rasheed187 · Jul 21, 2018

mood said: ↑

Venmo refuses to say why transactions are public by default
207 million transactions are public — and anyone can search them.
July 20, 2018
https://www.zdnet.com/article/venmo-refuses-to-say-why-transactions-are-public-by-default/
Click to expand...

Surely this has to be a joke? This will kill Venmo's reputation, just how dumb can you be. Even if they fix it I would refuse to use it any longer.

guest · Aug 26, 2018

It's Time to Stop Sending Money on Venmo
August 26, 2018
https://www.wired.com/story/venmo-alternatives/

Most Venmo competitors, like Square’s Cash app, share the same core feature: You can send money with a few taps and swipes. Venmo is unique in that it has a social networking component. By default, all peer-to-peer Venmo transactions—aside from the payment amount—are public, to everyone in the world.

Creepy, right? Venmo does give users the ability to limit who can see transactions [...] but many people don’t choose to adjust their privacy settings.

(Recently, even PayPal employees have questioned whether all transactions should be public by default, according to a Bloomberg story published earlier this week.)

If Venmo were the only cash-transfer app of its kind, then fine. But there are plenty of better options out there. [...] You likely already have several Venmo alternatives waiting for you on your phone.
Click to expand...

guest · Sep 27, 2018

Mozilla pushes PayPal to make Venmo transactions private by default
September 27, 2018
https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/27/m...o-make-venmo-transactions-private-by-default/

This week, Mozilla says it delivered a petition signed by 25,000 Americans asking Venmo to set transactions shared in its app to private by default, instead of public.

As Mozilla explains, “millions of Venmo users’ spending habits are available for anyone to see. That’s because Venmo transactions are currently public by default — unless users manually update their settings, anyone, anywhere can see whom they’re sending money to, and why.”

Many Venmo users likely feel that it’s not very dangerous to share through Venmo’s feed – a key feature of its popular payments app – that they paid back a friend for part of the dinner, drinks or some concert tickets, for example.

But a Berlin-based researcher, Hang Do Thi Duc, recently studied the risks associated with this sort of over-sharing.
Click to expand...

guest · Jun 13, 2019

Github project:
Venmo Transaction Dataset
Venmo transaction dataset for data analysis/visualization/anything
https://github.com/sa7mon/venmo-data

What is this?
This is a dataset of over 7,000,000 transactions scraped from the Venmo public API. Venmo is an app which allows users to easily send and receive money.

I am releasing this dataset in order to bring attention to Venmo users that all of this data is publicly available for anyone to grab without even an API key. There is some very valuable data here for any attacker conducting OSINT research.
Dataset Info
The dataset is in BSON form as it was exported from a MongoDB database. It has been compressed with xz to allow for faster transfers.

Compressed size: 1.03 GB / Uncompressed size: 10.87 GB

Click to expand...

Protect Yourself
I would highly encourage all users to switch their Venmo account to private by going to Settings > Privacy and selecting "Private" as well as Past Transactions > Change All to Private. Screenshot instructions are available here.
Click to expand...

guest · Jun 16, 2019

Millions of Venmo transactions scraped in warning over privacy settings
June 16, 2019
https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/16/millions-venmo-transactions-scraped/

A computer science student has scraped seven million Venmo transactions to prove that users’ public activity can still be easily obtained, a year after a privacy researcher downloaded hundreds of millions of Venmo transactions in a similar feat.

Dan Salmon said he scraped the transactions during a cumulative six months to raise awareness and warn users to set their Venmo payments to private.
A year on, Salmon showed little has changed and that it’s still easy to download millions of transactions through the company’s developer API without obtaining user permission or needing the app.

“There’s truly no reason to have this API open to unauthenticated requests,” he told TechCrunch. “The API only exists to provide like a scrolling feed of public transactions for the home page of the app, but if that’s your goal then you should require a token with each request to verify that the user is logged in.”
Click to expand...

guest · Aug 28, 2019

EFF and Mozilla Release Public Letter to Venmo
August 28, 2019
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/08/eff-and-mozilla-release-public-letter-venmo

EFF is teaming up with the Mozilla Foundation to tell Venmo to clean up its privacy act. In a public letter sent to President/CEO Dan Schulman and COO Bill Ready today, we are telling Venmo to make transactions private by default and let users hide their friend lists.

Both EFF and Mozilla have voiced concern with Venmo’s privacy practices in the past. Venmo is marketed as a way for friends to send and receive money, so people can easily split bills like restaurant checks or concert tickets. However, those transactions are public by default, which can reveal private details about who you spend time with and what you do with them.
Venmo is out of excuses to neglect privacy best practices. Read our letter below, and look out for an update if and when we receive a response.
Click to expand...

guest · Jul 20, 2021

Venmo drops the global social feed that could make your payments visible to strangers
The visibility of your Venmo payments is changing
July 20, 2021
https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/20/22585467/venmo-removes-global-social-feed-private-payments

Venmo announced it's removing its global social feed on Tuesday, the payment app’s notorious feature that allows strangers to potentially view payments you make and receive on Venmo (via Bloomberg).

Now Venmo’s social elements will be limited to your actual friends on the app in the “friends feed” without you having to toggle any features in the app. The company buried the change in a blog post detailing an update to the Venmo app.
Until recently, Venmo also offered users no control over who saw their friends list within the app, which is potentially incriminating in an entirely separate way from seeing the content of a transaction. After Buzzfeed News [...]
Click to expand...

guest · Jul 25, 2021

Venmo gets more private—but it’s still not fully safe
Until it offers privacy by default, it remains a liability for many of its users.
July 23, 2021
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/07/venmo-gets-more-private-but-its-still-not-fully-safe/

Venmo, the popular mobile payment service, has redesigned its app. That's normally news you could safely ignore, but this announcement is worth a closer look. In addition to making some navigational tweaks and adding new purchase protections, the PayPal-owned platform is finally shutting down its global social feed, where the app published transactions from people around the world. It's an important step toward resolving one of the most prominent privacy issues in the world of apps, but the work isn't finished yet.

The visibility of Venmo transactions and other user data has been criticized by privacy and consumer advocates for years.

“This commitment to this weird corporate bit, this corporate DNA, of a social payment app is a huge liability,” says Gennie Gebhart, activism director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group. “It’s not a disaster waiting to happen, it’s a disaster that’s already happened so many times to so many people.”
Click to expand...

“Venmo’s finally getting the message that maximum publicity on a financial app is a terrible idea,” says Kaili Lambe, senior campaigner at the Mozilla Foundation, a nonprofit focused on internet openness and accessibility. “However, from the beginning we have been calling on Venmo to be private by default, because so many Venmo users don’t actually know that their transactions are public to the world.”

“Even people who’ve been using Venmo for years might not know that their settings are public.”
Click to expand...

Log in or Sign up

Change Your Venmo Settings to Private Right Now

guest Guest

mirimir Registered Member

__Nikopol Registered Member

guest Guest

__Nikopol Registered Member

Rasheed187 Registered Member

guest Guest

guest Guest

guest Guest

guest Guest

guest Guest

guest Guest

guest Guest

Log in or Sign up

Change Your Venmo Settings to Private Right Now

guest Guest

mirimir Registered Member

__Nikopol Registered Member

guest Guest

__Nikopol Registered Member

Rasheed187 Registered Member

guest Guest

guest Guest

guest Guest

guest Guest

guest Guest

guest Guest

guest Guest

Useful Searches