Venmo: how the payment app exposes our private lives
A researcher has analysed millions of public transactions to prove just how much the app reveals about our life and habits
by Olivia Solon in San Francisco
Jul 17, 2018
3 minutes
Anyone can track a Venmo user’s purchase history and glean a detailed profile – including their drug deals, eating habits and arguments – because the payment app lacks default privacy protections.
This was the finding of a Berlin-based researcher, Hang Do Thi Duc, who analysed the more than 200 million public Venmo transactions made in 2017. Her aim was to highlight the privacy risk from using a seemingly innocuous peer-to-peer app.
By accessing the data through a public application programming interface, Do Thi Duc
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