Venmo privacy controls have been updated.
The company has added new privacy controls for friend lists following a shocking incident where the Venmo account of President Joe Biden was tracked down because of the app's poor privacy controls.
Jane Manchun Wong, an app researcher, discovered on May 28 that Venmo was working on new controls.
Venmo online shopping
Venmo Privacy Controls Update
According to The Verge, Venmo's spokesperson said that they are consistently evolving and strengthening the Venmo platform of all of their customers.
As part of their ongoing efforts, they are enhancing their in-app controls, providing customers an option to select a public, friends-only, or private setting for their friends list.
In order to find the new controls, just tap the hamburger icon while on the main feed, then tap Settings, Privacy, and then Friends List.
In the new menu, you can choose if you want your friends list to be public, visible to friends, or private. You can also toggle whether or not you want to appear in others users' friends list, according to CNET.
Venmo Leak
On May 14, the Venmo accounts for President Joe Biden and Dr. Jill Biden were removed after it was discovered that it can be easily found on the payment app, a discovery that is said to raise national security questions.
The website went looking for President Biden's account after it was mentioned in a New York Times report on White House conditions and working practices.
The NY Times reported lengthy policy debates, angry outbursts at advisers and officials, and plenty of time spent with grandchildren.
The story said that they have been know to show their grandfather apps like TikTok. One adviser stated that he had sent the grandchildren money using Venmo.
The previous administration tried to take down the popularity of TikTok, an app for sharing short videos, over its ownership by a Chinese company, ByteDance.
Venmo, which is owned by PayPal, enables simple payments between contacts. The transactions are public by default. They can be made private, but contact lists remain visible. President Biden's payments were private.
Reporters commonly scan Venmo for leads. The scandal engulfing the Congressman Matt Gaetz has included reporting on payments to women made by a former associate.
Furthermore, Reporters added that it took less than 10 minutes to find President Biden's account, using only a combination of the app's built-in search tool, and public friends feature.
In the process, it found almost a dozen Biden family members and mapped out a social web that encompasses not only the first family but a wide network of people around them, including the president's children, grandchildren, senior White House officials, and all of their contacts on Venmo.
The White House did not comment, but a Venmo spokesman said that the safety and privacy of all Venmo users and their information is always a top priority, and that they take this responsibility very seriously.
The spokesperson added that customers always have the ability to make their transactions private, and determine their own privacy settings in the app.
They are consistently evolving and strengthening the privacy measures for all Venmo users to continue to provide a safe, secure place to send and spend money.
Related Article: Venmo Joe Biden Trace: Security Flaw Leads to POTUS Account Tracing in Minutes, Here's How Hackers Do It
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Written by Sophie Webster
