If you use Venmo to send and receive money, you might want to check your privacy settings. Many users are inadvertently sharing personal information, such as their contact list, with the public.
Gennie Gebhart, with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, tells KNX In Depth, luckily, it's a simple fix.
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Gebhart deals with digital privacy and civil liberties, and she said Venmo is just like other social media platforms, such as Facebook or X, where sharing settings are public by default.
The difference here is that until about two years ago, Venmo did not have the option to change privacy settings.
"Venmo has been around almost a decade" and, "For a lot of people, they set up their Venmo a long time ago," Gebhart said. Now, "They might not even be thinking about all the transaction data and contact list data that is still out there on the internet for anybody to see."
It's not just the average user who falls prey to this issue. It was discovered, through his public Venmo account, that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was taking payments from lawyers, which is a potential conflict of interest.
President Joe Biden's contact list was made public thanks to the default settings on his Venmo account.
Gebhart says this is an old problem that Venmo could quickly fix, but its, "Taken them a really long time to respond to common sense complaints from users that they don't want to share this stuff with the whole world. Much less with any random person who might be in their phone contact list or their Facebook friend list, two things that have auto-populated Venmo, without a lot of people knowing."
Venmo does advertise as a social platform, and sharing is a staple of all social media, so some users may enjoy that aspect of the app. But if you are concerned, Gebhart says, go to the privacy settings and see what you can change - especially with Venmo because, in her educated opinion, when it comes to privacy settings, Venmo is worse than Facebook.
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