Venmo, Paypal’s financial application that makes it easy to send money to your friends, is launching important updates that add new privacy options. In the future, Venmo users will have the option to hide their friends’ list, making others want to identify their social circles. The change followed the discovery of the venmo account of President Biden and the people he was associated with him.
Earlier this month, the New York Times published an article that includes a brief mention of the use of Venmo Joe Biden – and quickly leads to reports from BuzzFeed announcing that he has found a President’s account. Although the report did not reveal his colleagues, it specifies the number of people in his social circle, the authors can find, renew talks about financial applications and related privacy issues.
Although Venmo users have the option to hide their transactions from public views, the application has never offered a way for users to hide their friends’ list. Many show the potential of this privacy problem can cause, including allowing a person to follow the former, get an idea of a person’s life and routine, and even explain the coating of whistleblowers.
Only a few days after the report detailing Venmo Biden’s account, the company has revealed that it will allow users to hide their friends’ list – although this list will be published by default. In addition, users will be able to set their list to ‘Friends,’ Venmo told BuzzFeed News, offering a compromise between privacy and the social networking foundation application.
This is a victory for the privacy advocate that has spent years highlighting the problem of a list of public friends posing to users. The ability to make personal transactions only offers certain levels of protection, especially if friends on the public list they make their own transactions. Everyone from scammers to stalkers can take advantage of this information, and it is a big problem when it comes to public figures like the President.