Stop Strangers from Snooping on your Venmo

2019-12-15

Opinion: Venmo is easy to use and helpful. Fact: unless you take this one step, anybody can see who you pay.

Hello everybody. Today I am here to talk about Venmo, the handy tool made by PayPal, with the purpose of making it super easy to pay others right from your phone.

By default, your transaction history is public, which is a big no-no for privacy. Imagine somebody being able to know who you pay. This may not seem inherently malicious, but if you think about it, this lack of privacy allows people such as analytics companies to scrape this data, and add it to their profiles, which are most likely already big!

Alright, enough talking.

To change the setting, follow these steps:

  1. Open Venmo.
  2. Click the menu icon, and select settings.
  3. Open the privacy tab.
  4. Change the default privacy level to private, not friends.
  5. You are good.

Happy paying in privacy!