Reporters could quickly find Biden's Venmo account and the network of his social connections on Venmo, showing why the app's friends lists are a privacy issue
BuzzFeed News found President Joe Biden's Venmo account after less than 10 minutes of looking for it, revealing a network …
BuzzFeed News
Context & Ripple Effects
Venmo's exposure problem predated the Biden finding: a 2018 researcher showed that default-public transactions could disclose names, comments, and dates through its API. The Biden account made the separate risk in friends lists tangible, because a visible social graph can reveal relationships even when payment details are not the focus.
Biden's Venmo account and the connected network became readily discoverable, demonstrating that Venmo friends lists could expose high-profile users' social ties.
Venmo faced an immediate product-privacy gap in a feature that made account discovery and connection mapping easy.
Second-order effects
Venmo's subsequent friends-list visibility controls moved more of the burden for limiting social-graph exposure from passive default settings to explicit user choices.
The earlier public-transaction research and this account-discovery report broadened the privacy question from individual payments to the relationship data surrounding them.
Third-order effects
Venmo's later friends-only onboarding default points to a broader product-design standard: social and payment apps increasingly treat visibility defaults, not just settings menus, as the core privacy decision.
As social graphs become a distinct source of sensitive information, platforms face pressure to limit discoverability across both content and connection layers rather than addressing each exposure separately.
The trend: Consumer platforms are moving from public-by-default social discovery toward privacy defaults that constrain both activity and relationship visibility.
BuzzFeed News found Biden's Venmo account after less than 10 minutes of looking for it, revealing a network of his private social connections, a national security issue and a major privacy concern for everyone who uses the app https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ...
It took us less than 10 minutes to find the president's Venmo account. From there, you could find his whole family and associates and everyone around them. This is a major national security concern. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ...
Venmo lets you make individual payments set to private, but there's NO WAY to make your actual account private, nor can you hide your friends list. Which is why... https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ...
These article provides countless examples of how your Venmo account's publicly available list of friends is a security risk. #MedTwitter - “therapists who use Venmo to receive payment from clients were unaware that their friend lists showed who they were working with.” #HIPAA htt…
In reporting previously I removed *all* my friends from Venmo. And then they slowly started to be re-added to my friends list. And I realized it was through the really terrible and invasive feature that I can't turn off.
Also, if you made a transaction between July and October 2018 and a couple months in 2019, there's a decent chance it's in this scraped data set, which is on the Internet forever https://github.com/... https://twitter.com/...
Venmo is like a public blockchain except with kyc tying every address to a real world identity. Solving for one I'll creates another. https://twitter.com/...
This is why I'm an advocate for privacy tokens that will conceal the information present in a typical transaction. People should not have their data or connections publicly exposed. If illegal activity isn't taking place, our transactions aren't anyone's business. https://twitter…
really starting to think that procedural slaps on the wrist for companies that are heavily incentivized to claw as much data out of us as possible aren't deterring anti-consumer privacy practices https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/...