It Took Buzzfeed News Just Ten Minutes to Map Out Joe Biden’s Venmo Network ⇥ buzzfeednews.com

Ryan Mac, Katie Notopoulos, Ryan Brooks, and Logan McDonald, Buzzfeed News:

On Friday, following a passing mention in the New York Times that the president has sent his grandchildren money on Venmo, BuzzFeed News searched for the president’s account using only a combination of the app’s built-in search tool and public friends feature. In the process, BuzzFeed News found nearly a dozen Biden family members and mapped out a social web that encompasses not only the first family, but a wide network of people around them, including the president’s children, grandchildren, senior White House officials, and all of their contacts on Venmo.

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While many critics have focused on how the app makes all transactions public by default, Venmo’s friends lists are arguably a larger privacy issue. Even if a Venmo account is set to make payments private, its friends list remains exposed. There is no setting to make this information private, which means it can provide a window into someone’s personal life that could be exploited by anyone — including trolls, stalkers, police, and spies.

I would love to know why Venmo continues to believe that its financial services app demands a poorer degree of privacy protection than a protected Twitter account. Buzzfeed documents an extraordinary list of proven privacy vulnerabilities that I am sure most people do not think of when they send someone a few bucks. This is not new information; this is basic stuff. And it isn’t like Venmo is some startup that just doesn’t know better — it is owned by PayPal.