Gennie Gebhart, the acting activism director at EFF, told BuzzFeed News last week that it is “past time” for Venmo to take this step. “The list of people with whom you exchange money paints a startlingly clear picture of the people who live, date, and do business with you,” EFF and Mozilla wrote. In 2019, digital civil liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Mozilla wrote an open letter to Dan Schulman, the CEO of PayPal, which owns Venmo, imploring him to allow Venmo users to change the privacy settings of their friends lists. The president’s Venmo account is no longer online, according to BuzzFeed News, which didn’t publish any of the usernames involved in its story “due to national security concerns.” Though the commander-in-chief’s transactions were set to private (transactions on Venmo are public by default), BuzzFeed News said it could access his friends list and therefore found the Venmo accounts of several members of the Biden family plus members of the administration. The new feature comes more than two weeks after BuzzFeed News reported it found President Joe Biden’s Venmo account within 10 minutes of searching for it. Jane Manchun Wong, a researcher who often publicly identifies new app features before they’re officially released, first spotted the new feature on Friday. “As part of these ongoing efforts, we have added in-app controls providing customers an option to select a public, friends-only, or private setting for their friends list.” “We’re consistently evolving and strengthening the Venmo platform for all of our customers,” a Venmo spokesperson said to NowThis on Tuesday. Prior to this recent rollout, users of the money transfer app, which was founded in 2009, could not change the privacy settings of their friends lists, which were public by default. Venmo now allows users to make their friends lists invisible - a feature that privacy advocates have long called for.
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