J.D. Vance Venmo connections public, as privacy failing still in place six years later

A report on J.D. Vance, Trump’s pick for the VP ticket, is the latest pointer to a continuing privacy fail in which Venmo connections and transactions are public by default …

Venmo privacy fail first highlighted in 2018

A major Venmo privacy failing was first highlighted by a security researcher back in 2018.

Anyone can track a Venmo user’s purchase history and glean a detailed profile – including their drug deals, eating habits and arguments – because the payment app lacks default privacy protections.

This allowed her to see a complete transaction history for anyone who hadn’t actively changed their settings from public to private. The publicly-visible data even includes the message sent with the payment.

Not a bug but a feature, claimed the company

Far from apologizing and fixing the problem, the PayPal-owned company doubled-down, claiming that it was a feature, not a bug.

“We make it default because it’s fun to share [information] with friends in the social world,” a Venmo representative told CNET Friday. “[We’ve seen that] people open up Venmo to see what their family and friends are up to.”

Or, you know, anyone they may wish to cyberstalk.

JD Vance connections report the latest example

Vance is the latest public figure to learn this the hard way. Wired reports that his Venmo connections are potentially embarrassing to the candidate.

[His] public Venmo account gives an unfiltered glimpse into his extensive network of connections with establishment GOP heavyweights, wealthy financiers, technology executives, the prestige press, and fellow graduates of Yale Law School—precisely the elites he rails against […]

Vance has frequently positioned himself as anti-elite, writing in Hillbilly Elegy: “Sometimes I view members of the elite with an almost primal scorn.” In an April post on X, Vance, who graduated Yale Law School in 2013, condemned “elite universities,” calling them “expensive day care centers for coddled children.” His network is largely made up of attorneys, the vast majority of whom received their law degrees from Yale Law around the same time he did.

Photo: Gage Skidmore/CC2.0 (cropped)