![]() BuzzFeed News reported that Venmo stores all old profile photos on its servers, with no way for people to remove them. “What we'd really like to see Venmo do next is make privacy the default for friend lists and transactions, not just a settings option.”Īnother privacy issue with Venmo is how it handles people’s photos. “It's past time for Venmo to take this step, and it's definitely a step in the right direction,” Gennie Gebhart, the acting activism director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told BuzzFeed News. To remove someone as a friend, a user has to unfriend the person manually. The app encourages people to import their phone's contact list or Facebook friend list, creating networks where people can friend hundreds of other people on Venmo to allow them to pay others more easily. Because people use Venmo to get paid, they often use a variation of their real name and real photos of themselves. Venmo was the only major social network that had a contact-based friend list that could not be made private. Even if a person were to set their Venmo account to make payments private, their friend list had remained exposed, providing a window into their personal life that could be exploited by trolls, stalkers, police officers, and scammers. While many people have criticized the company for making transactions on the app public by default, Venmo’s public friend lists are a separate privacy issue. Founded in 2009 on the idea that payments could be another form of social content, Venmo allowed people to pay each other and post about those payments to its public feed and other social media platforms. “Having my Venmo friend list being visible to everyone, I found it odd that they didn’t provide an option for people to make it private.”įor years, digital rights groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, security researchers, and journalists have warned that Venmo’s public friend lists were a privacy threat. “I’m glad Venmo is working quickly to fix this privacy flaw,” Wong said. There was also an option that apparently allowed her to hide her account from other people's friend lists.Īfter several tests, BuzzFeed News reporters could see some friend lists that had been set to private, suggesting the change may take some time to become fully functional. ![]() When she experimented with the feature, she told BuzzFeed News, she could toggle options to make her friend list visible to the public, to her friends on the app, or only to her. On Friday, Jane Manchun Wong, a software engineer who regularly exposes features being tested by companies like Facebook and Twitter before they are released, found that Venmo was building a way to allow people to make friend lists private and tweeted a screenshot. Two weeks ago, BuzzFeed News used public friend lists, which previously could not be made private, to find the president, the first lady, and members of their immediate family, showing how the app can put people at risk.Ī spokesperson for Venmo confirmed that the "hide friends" feature has been added and told BuzzFeed News, “We are enhancing our in-app controls providing customers an option to select a public, friends-only, or private setting for their friends list.” The move allows people to make their friend list private or restrict who can see it, adding a privacy feature to an app that digital rights groups and critics have called a security nightmare. On the PC, I could of easily been in 5 guilds within 15 min, I managed to get into 1 guild in over 4 hours of playing on Console due to the poor communication tools provided.Venmo, the mobile payments app owned by PayPal, is changing its privacy settings after a BuzzFeed News story uncovered President Joe Biden’s account earlier this month. It just seems that with voice chat and no chat box it makes it hard to group up or even communicate with other people to join guilds. I tried contacting those that show up on the dashboard but just get an error saying they cannot be found. There is also the issue where on the Xbox One Dashboard it is showing that I have 36 friends all playing ESO, but from within the game it says there are 7 only out of 34 which is really weird to me. I have someone through the friends list on the dashboard that says he is online, he is one of the people that is inviting people to the guild but when I try to join him it says it cannot find him within the game.
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