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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.

Once she downloaded and combed through the available data, Duc put together five example cases of real Venmo users (their identities are not revealed in the report) to detail just what information is available to anyone curious enough to look.




In one of Duc’s examples, the user is clearly a “cannabis retailer” whose customers pay him via Venmo for “CBD,” various tree emojis and “headband, an exotic strain of marijuana’ (Urban Dictionary),” per Duc’s report. What’s more, though, is that based on the publicly available data, she was able to infer that the user is male and operates his weed business in Santa Barbara, California. How did she manage that? “[S]ome of his customers have a Facebook URL as their profile picture which includes their Facbeook ID and so it was easy for me to see where some of them, and therefore the protagonist of this story as well, live.” (Our cannabis retailer has since changed his settings.)

“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.”



It’s creepy, though it’s far from the first time users have been warned to make their settings private. Still, it’s a good breakdown of exactly what information is publicly available about account holders.

Venmo told Fast Company that the company takes security seriously but “did not comment on why Venmo’s feed is public by default.”


The moral of the story? Change your transactions to private ASAP (it’s simple to do in Settings). You can also make past transactions private. Alternatively, use a different peer-to-peer payment system , like Quick Pay or Zelle, that does n’t broadcast what you’re doing.

Public By Default | Hang Do Thi Duc