There’s an app for snooping on your friends, family and colleagues to find out about their fancy dinners, the people they are dating and the parties they are attending that you weren’t invited to.

It’s not a social networking app like Facebook or Snapchat. It’s Venmo, the app that became popular more than a decade ago by enabling people to send mobile payments to one another and to post those transactions, often in the form of a cute emoji, on a public timeline.

The snooping works the other way around, too. Even if you seldom use it today, the app is most likely leaking sensitive information about you to the general public.

How do I know? I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I recently discovered that my contacts list, which includes the names of people in my phone book, was published on Venmo for anyone using the app to see.

Over a decade ago, Venmo made people’s contact lists visible to its users. It created an option to hide the address book only two years ago, long after I had stopped using the app.

Venmo was founded in 2009 as a music start-up that let users buy songs from bands through a text message. By the time eBay acquired it in 2013, it had become a mobile wallet service that was trendy among younger people who were gung-ho about sharing information about themselves.

At the time, social networking was novel, and posting your thoughts, movements and achievements for everyone to know about was cutting-edge, not sinister.

But Venmo remains an app with a strong social networking element, one of many in a generation of apps that are now nearly 15 years old. If you no longer find value in the service, the safest bet may be to delete the account.

Let’s dive into why Venmo remains a privacy concern and what to do to protect your data.

In the early 2010s, as smartphones became popular, Venmo rode the coattails of companies like Facebook and Twitter, which brought the concept of a public timeline into the mainstream. Similar to those networks, Venmo allowed people to publicly post to a feed, in its case details of payment transactions, including the dollar amount, time, date and a description, such as a pizza or taxicab emoji.

At the time, Braintree, the payments company that bought Venmo in 2012 before it was purchased by eBay, said Venmo had created “rave-worthy experiences” to simplify mobile payments between smartphone users.

Venmo has made some changes over the years to protect its users’ privacy. In 2021, it disabled its global feed, a stream where users could see Venmo transactions among strangers.

But critics say the app still falls short. Today, you can see transactions among people who are not your friends if you visit their profiles.

Venmo is still set by default to publicly share when you receive or make a payment. There’s an option to make the transaction private, but if you use the app quickly and don’t notice the setting, you could unknowingly broadcast the payments.

“It’s not just that I went out to pizza with this person,” said Gennie Gebhart of Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights nonprofit. “It’s a pattern of who you live with, interact with and do business with, and how it changes over time.”

In 2017, Hang Do Thi Duc, a data researcher who was at the Mozilla Foundation, published Public by Default, an interactive graphic summarising the intimate details scraped from 208 million Venmo transactions. The graphic homed in on the daily lives of several Venmo users, including a cannabis dealer, a food cart vendor and a married couple splitting bills and paying off a loan together.

To prevent your day-to-day life from being broadcast, make sure to change the settings. Click on the Me tab, tap the settings icon and select Privacy. Under default privacy settings, select Private. Then, under the “More” section in Privacy, click “Past Transactions” and make sure to set that to “Change All to Private”.

Venmo has made the contacts list, which can be generated from your smartphone’s address book or your Facebook friends list, viewable to any other user.

That can make a lot of information public. In 2021, my New York Times colleague Ryan Mac, who was then at BuzzFeed News, used Venmo to discover President Joe Biden’s account and personal contacts list. Biden later deleted his Venmo account.

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