Venmo Update Removes Public Payment Stream, Finally Jesus, WTF

Venmo is ending its long-standing policy of telling all aliens on the fucking planet who new users are sending money to and why for no reason, according to Bloomberg.

The mobile payment app has had social features since its inception that no one asked for, with each transaction appearing on a timeline next to the memo field that indicates what a payment is for. By default, and unbeknownst to most newly registered users, the stream is set to public, or as Venmo’s settings menu says, “Visible to everyone on the Internet. “ This means that anyone on the app can see how someone who hasn’t bothered to change the settings is using it, a red flag so blatant that it happened in a Regulations of the Federal Trade Commission in 2018.

No one wants hikes to spy on their transactions, making this feature a voyeuristic and utterly confusing invasion of privacy at best (and at worst, revealing who a user is banging with, having a lunch break job interview. , having pizza with at 3:00 am, or buying drugs). The available evidence suggests that many, if not most, still seem unaware that they are broadcasting their Venmo transactions over the open web. For example, the author of this article hopped on Venmo this afternoon and was immediately greeted with a list of transactions between complete strangers with public profiles, revealing payments labeled “Beer,” “Danks,“ “Broke bich gotta pay for parking,“ “My toes”, “No more fortnite,“ “Drugs”, “Birdies and Strippers.” But mostly strippers,“ “$ 3XU4L F4V0R $,“ “7 hours before the game”, “I’m drunk,“ “Cocaine crack in the morning,“ “So I was there, cream of pesto on my tits,“ and “Down ass foo I’m fuckinnnnnnggg deaaaaad.“ Others were just suggestive emojis, like eggplant, peach, splash, and the language.

Likewise, Venmo made friends lists on the app public by default, which is how journalists hunted Account by President Joe Biden in May 2021.

Bloomberg reported on Tuesday that Venmo is now choosing to eliminate the Global Social Feed, which means the public feed will disappear completely, presumably meaning that the default privacy setting will now be “Friends” (“Visible to sender, recipients and their Venmo buddies. ”) In a blog post, the owner of Venmo PayPal explained that while he always wanted friends to be able to ‘share and share payments and experiences’, he was moving away from intentionally making it a privacy nightmare:

Venmo has always been social at its core, designed to be a place for friends to share and share payments and experiences. As part of our ongoing efforts to continually evolve the Venmo platform, while remaining true to the core of the Venmo experience, we are removing the Global Feed, and the Friends Feed is now the only social feed that will appear in the game. ‘application. The Venmo community has reached over 70 million customers, so this change allows customers to connect and share meaningful moments and experiences with the people who matter most.

As TechCrunch noted, the ability to make transactions public is still available, although transactions are only visible on a user’s profile. PayPal also took the time to reiterate that Venmo rrecently startedm allowing users to set their friend lists as private, a change he announced following the Biden fiasco and finally deployed in June 2021.

Although this is an upgrade, we strongly urge you to ensure that your default privacy setting is changed to Private (“Visible to sender and recipient only”). Again, any setting other than this is like letting friends read your Venmo payment. history on a whim.

Venmo also confirmed that it is rolling out a feature this week that allows users to mark a transaction as a purchase of goods or services, thus qualifying for the company’s protection plan. This change will also mean that Venmo will begin charging merchants a fee of 1.9% of the transaction plus 10 cents, which Recoding reported didn’t really work well with small business operators accustomed to toll-free payment processing. Some of these marketers took to social media to voice their complaints, in some cases urging customers to forgo payment protection in order to help them stay in business.