Digital Privacy: “Millions of Venmo Transactions Scraped in Warning Over Privacy Settings”

Note: infoDOCKET first posted about the issue discussed below on July 18, 2018 and September 27, 2018: “Digital Privacy: “PayPal’s Venmo App Exposes Most Transactions via its API”

From Techcrunch:

A computer science student has scraped seven million Venmo transactions to prove that users’ public activity can still be easily obtained, a year after a privacy researcher downloaded hundreds of millions of Venmo transactions in a similar feat.

Dan Salmon said he scraped the transactions during a cumulative six months to [our emphasis] raise awareness and warn users to set their Venmo payments to private.

The peer-to-peer mobile payments service faced criticism last year after Hang Do Thi Duc, a former Mozilla fellow, downloaded 207 million transactions. The scraping effort was possible because Venmo payments between users are public by default. The scrapable data inspired several new projects — including a bot that tweeted out every time someone bought drugs.

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