Venmo takes another step towards privacy

As part of a bigger redesign, the payment app Venmo has stopped its public global feed. That means the Venmo app will no longer show you transactions from strangers or show strangers your transactions all in one place. This is a big step in the right direction. But as the redesigned app rolls out to users in the coming weeks, it’s unclear what Venmos’ defaults will be. If Venmo and parent company PayPal are serious about privacy, the app privacy should be the default, not just an option still buried in the settings.

Currently, all transactions and friend lists on Venmo are public by default, giving a detailed picture of who you live with, where you like to hang out, who you date, and where you do business. It doesn’t take much imagination to think of all the ways this could harm real users, and the gallery of Venmo privacy horrors is good–documented Bee this point.

However, Venmo apparently has no plans to make transactions private at this point by default. That would waste the opportunity it now has to finally address the concerns of Venmo Users, journalists, and advocates Like it EF and Mozilla. We hope Venmo reconsiders.

There is nothing social about sharing your credit card statement with your friends.

Even a seemingly positive move from public defaults to friends-only would maintain much of Venmos’ privacy-invasive status quo. That’s largely due to Venmos’ track record of aggressively sucking up users’ phone contacts and Facebook friends to populate their Venmo friend lists. The Venmos installation process encourages users to connect their phone contacts and Facebook friends to Venmo. From there, the automatic sync can continue silently and persistently, cluttering your Venmo friends list with people you haven’t affirmatively chosen to connect with in the app. In some cases, there is no option to turn off this automatic synchronization. There’s nothing social about sharing your credit card statement with a random subset of your phone contacts and Facebook friends, and Venmo shouldn’t make that kind of disclosure standard.

It’s also unclear whether Venmo will continue to offer a public setting now that the global feed has gone. Public institutions would still expose user activity on their individual profile pages and on Venmos’ public API, leaving them vulnerable to the kind of targeted snooping that Venmo has become infamous for.

We were pleased to see that Venmo recently launched the ? positive step from give user settings to hide their friend lists. Getting rid of the creepy global feed is another positive step. Venmo still has the time to make transactions and friend lists private by default, and we hope it makes the right choice.

If you haven’t already, change your transaction and friends list settings to private by following the steps in . to follow this post.