Venmo: how the payment app exposes our private lives

A researcher has analysed millions of public transactions to prove just how much the app reveals about our life and habits

Anyone can track a Venmo user's purchase history and glean a detailed profile - including their drug deals, eating habits and arguments - because the payment app lacks default privacy protections.

This was the finding of a Berlin-based researcher, Hang Do Thi Duc, who analysed the more than 200 million public Venmo transactions made in 2017. Her aim was to highlight the privacy risk from using a seemingly innocuous peer-to-peer app.