Venmo will now let users control the visibility of their friends list, following a report in which Biden's Venmo account and connections were easily found
Venmo, the mobile payments app owned by PayPal, is changing its privacy settings after a BuzzFeed News story uncovered President Joe Biden's account earlier this month.
BuzzFeed News
Context & Ripple Effects
Two weeks after BuzzFeed News showed how quickly reporters could locate Joe Biden's account and map his social connections on the app — a story built on Venmo's own friends-list feature — the PayPal-owned company is giving users a setting to control who can see that list. The move reverses a design stance Venmo had defended publicly: back in 2018 it argued that public-by-default transaction history was a feature because sharing with friends is fun.
The friends list was the exposure surface here, not the payments themselves — the reporters' search of Biden's account demonstrated that a payment app's social graph doubles as an intelligence tool for anyone probing a target's network.
First-order effects
Venmo users gain direct control over friends-list visibility, closing the exact lookup path BuzzFeed News used to surface Biden's account and contacts.
PayPal now owns a visible privacy concession on Venmo, its highest-profile consumer brand, made in direct response to press scrutiny rather than regulator action.
Second-order effects
Opt-in privacy settings only reach users who go looking for them, so pressure builds on Venmo to flip defaults — a step the company eventually took when it began setting new users' posts to "friends only" during onboarding.
Rival payment apps face the same question about their social graphs, since any peer-to-peer product exposing connections by default is one reporter away from the same story.
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds — press exposé, then feature toggle, then default flip — consumer payment platforms will treat their social layers as liability surfaces rather than growth loops, with defaults set conservatively at onboarding rather than left open for engagement.
The episode also sketches a template where a single high-profile account's exposure (a sitting president's, here) does the work of a regulatory prompt, pushing platform governance ahead of formal rules on financial-social data.
The trend: Social payments are steadily unwinding public-by-default design, moving from opt-in privacy toggles toward conservative defaults set during onboarding.
Venmo is working on friends list privacy settings after Joe Biden's Venmo friend list was uncovered: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ... users will also be able to choose whether to appear in other users' friends lists https://twitter.com/...
As of now, Venmo's Friends List Privacy is on “Public” by default The screenshot shows “Private” was picked because I tapped the option as soon as I saw it
Honest question: Why are folks still using Venmo? Cash App, Apple Pay, and even Zelle are more private, have instant payments, and are free. Venmo is a privacy nightmare (by default). https://twitter.com/...
App privacy is something that should probably be considered before your company becomes the subject of a media debacle, especially one where you accidentally leak information about @POTUS https://twitter.com/...
Nothing like a public relations inferno to get a multibillion dollar company to change something people have warned them about for years. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ... https://twitter.com/...
After @wongmjane uncovered the feature, Venmo confirmed it to us: It will launch a way for people to make their friend lists private. The move comes after we found Joe Biden's secret Venmo account two weeks ago using public friend lists. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ...
@wongmjane @Venmo The defaults they choose is going to be important. The same applies for transactions being public by default. It's really wild that a payments company thinks sharing what you paid for and who you paid by default is a good idea. At least you can change it. https:…
Having public-only friends list was a HUGE privacy issue for Venmo, one that they never budged on even when privacy advocates urged them. There was no way to make your account private or hide your contacts. Which put lots of people at risk.