VICTORY: You Can Now Make Your Venmo Friends List Private. Here’s How.

It took two and a half years and one national security incident, but Venmo did it, folks: users now have privacy settings to hide their friends lists.

EFF first pointed out the problem with Venmo friends lists in early 2019. While Venmo offered a setting to make your payments and transactions private, there was no option to hide your friends list. No matter how many settings you tinkered with, Venmo would show your full friends list to anyone else with a Venmo account. That meant an effectively public record of the people you exchange money with regularly, along with whoever the app might have automatically imported from your phone contact list or even your Facebook friends list. The only way to make a friends list “private” was to manually delete friends one at a time; turn off auto-syncing; and, when the app wouldn’t even let users do that, monitor for auto-populated friends and remove them one by one, too.

This public-no-matter-what friends list design was a privacy disaster waiting to happen, and it happened to the President of the United States. Using the app’s search tool and all those public friends lists, Buzzfeed News found President Biden’s account in less than 10 minutes, as well as those of members of the Biden family, senior staffers, and members of Congress.  This appears to have been the last straw for Venmo: after more than two years of effectively ignoring calls from EFF, Mozilla, and others, the company has finally started to roll out privacy settings for friends lists.

As we’ve noted before, this is the bare minimum. Providing more privacy settings options so users can opt-out of the publication of their friends list is a step in the right direction. But what Venmo—and any other payment app—must do next is

[…]

Read the original article: VICTORY: You Can Now Make Your Venmo Friends List Private. Here’s How.