A researcher studied a year of public Venmo transactions. Here's what she learned
Do Thi Duc, a 27-year-old coder and privacy researcher in Berlin, gleaned a surprising amount of info from the nearly 208 million public transactions made on Venmo last year. She could do this because, according to research she released Tuesday, more than 18 million Venmo users never changed the platform's default settings, which make all of their transactions public.
She has, for example, followed the lives of a Southern California couple paying off a loan while regularly ordering pizza and taking their dog to the vet. She's on to the guy in Santa Barbara, California, who makes a living selling marijuana treats with names like "Gorilla cookies." And she's watched a romantic relationship develop between two Texans who flirted in the comments section of a payment. (She can't, however, say how things turned out, because the couple eventually took their conversation elsewhere.)
"There are some people who are intentionally public, but there are a lot of people who are not aware of this public by default setting," Do Thi Duc said. "Whether you're sharing this data consciously or unconsciously, you should think about who can access it and what things they could do [with it]."
