Cyberstalking is More Effective With Venmo

rgMekanic

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Mobile peer-to-peer payment app Venmo is great for splitting a dinner bill or giving a friend gas money, but according to a report from MarketWatch, it's also great at helping you spy on people! In Venmo, transactions are public by default, so while the amount of the transfer is hidden, your payment activity shows who you are sending payments to, and what for if you put in a description of the payment. This allows any would be sleuth to find out if you've been spending time with someone you shouldn't have, or spending money on less than legal things.
Doesn't anyone just use cash to buy their drugs anymore? As creepy as this is, there are a few things to take away. First is don't put information you don't want online. Second is if someone spends hours reading your transaction history, be thankful that they are your ex.

Ben Ryan, a 28-year-old Jersey Shore resident, came across an old fling on Venmo and couldn’t resist checking to see what he had been up to. "I saw his name come up and I was, like, 'Oh, this is going to be good,'" Ryan told MarketWatch. "I couldn’t believe I was actually doing this. I was going back to 2016. I sat in bed and scrolled."
 
Venmo's transactions can be made private, but it's opt-in?? WTF is that about? Very baffling that it's even an option to be public, that more than 1% of users keep it public, and that it's default is public.
 
If only there were an anonymous peer to peer digital currency. That would be neat. Somebody should come up with that.
 
I thought the point of venmo was to show off what you buy... Hard to be surprised by this.
 
"I couldn’t believe I was actually doing this. I was going back to 2016. I sat in bed and scrolled."


Ben sounds like he has issues.. getting that excited over an ex. and he sat in bed and "scrolled".. is that what its called nowadays?


;>)
 
It's a pretty convenient app. When we have a big gathering at the bar or diner one person picks up the tab on his card and we just split it later through Venmo, saves us those ten minutes waiting for the waiter to work a dozen receipts and their credit cards in, plus less incidents of billing mixups.

I turned the privacy settings up so no biggie, but I don't get why open privacy is the default either, maybe they'll need to change this to comply with GDPR or something.
 
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When something is advertised and 'fun' is used while describing financial transactions, might be suspect in my opinion.
 
I got venmo so the youngins at the office can actually pay their share of the bill when we go out to lunch. Now I get to see all their transactions and their friends transactions. It seems a mite invasive.

Of course the content is not necessarily trustworthy. One of their friends just tags every transaction with an eggplant. I wonder if he is considered a funny guy in this day and age.
 
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