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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Filed under: Data Files, News, Patrons and Users
About Gary Price
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com. Gary is also the co-founder of infoDJ an innovation research consultancy supporting corporate product and business model teams with just-in-time fact and insight finding.
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