Venmo is removing one of its creepiest features: A feed that let you view what random people are using the payment app for.
On Tuesday, Venmo announced that it's axing the “global feed” function through an update that’s rolling now out for Android and iOS users.
“The friends feed is now the only social feed that will appear in the app,” the PayPal-owned service said. “The Venmo community has grown to more than 70 million customers, so this change allows customers to connect and share meaningful moments and experiences with the people who matter most.”
For better or worse, Venmo encourages you to write a description for each transaction you make on the app. The description will then circulate over the platform, allowing your friends to see the nature of the payment.
However, the global feed took things a step further. It created an easily accessible scrolling feed that made the descriptions public for anyone to see. Not helping the matter is how people often use their real names on the app.
You can conceal the nature of your payments by going into Venmo’s privacy settings, and making your transactions private between you and the sender or recipient. But it’s up to the user to toggle it on.
As a result, researchers have warned about the privacy risks around Venmo for years. One researcher, Hang Do Thi Duc, collected and analyzed 208 million Venmo transactions through the app’s API, and uncovered information about drug deals and romantic partners fighting.
Venmo’s decision to remove the global feed does rein in some of the data exposure, but not all of it. You can still search for people on the app, click on their profiles, and see what they’ve been using Venmo for, unless they’ve changed their privacy settings.
In addition, the app can still make your friends list over Venmo public for anyone to see. In May, BuzzFeed highlighted the problem by using the function to view President Biden’s friend list.
In response, Venmo introduced a new privacy control that can make your friends list visible only to you. But again, it’s opt-in. By default, Venmo exposes your friends list to the public.
To access the privacy controls, tap the hamburger icon in the upper-right corner of the app, then select Settings > Privacy. The next page will show you the privacy settings for your payments. At the bottom of the page you can access the privacy controls for your friends list.