Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/07/20/wired-took-a-look-at-jd-vances-venmo-friends-list.html
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“Look, you can place some arbitrary limit on self corruption and live some normal passable sort of life, or you can go all in, let no notion of personal morality get in your way, and sit on a pile of wealth and luxury to the end of your days - what do you say?” --Mephistopheles* offering Vance the contract
(*embodied in the form of a dozen already corrupted contract-signed rich people starting with peter thiel. is ‘soul’ corruption a pyramid scheme?)
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When I finally signed up for a Venmo account I was shocked at how terrible the default settings are about what information is made public. If you don’t opt out then anyone and everyone can see all of your transactions. Is there anyone who would actually want that??
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Hey, if you’ve got nothing to hide…
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Ah, the humble salt-of-the-Earth Man of the People™…
Lonesome Rhodes was more authentic than this victim-blaming baby-faced fascist fraud.
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I’m not sure. I can’t see a reason why you would leave it public. I’ve tried to tell a couple friends who use it to lock that shit down, at least one of them did not and said they prefer it public so the people she may do business with get “exposure” or whatever. Seems like a silly reason to me. 
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Oh definitely. Venmo is owned by PayPal, which is “owned by its shareholders” - so Vanguard Group and BlackRock to start, and any other institutional investors who know the value of default settings ( https://boingboing.net/2023/11/14/courtroom-gaffe-reveals-google-pays-apple-36of-revenues-in-search-deal.html )
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It was, bizarrely, it’s selling point back in the day. It’s pitch was transactions as a “social activity.” It was the Facebook of money. “Look how cool my coworker is, he keeps paying people back for pizzas and beers. Must be a fun guy!”
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The whole concept of Venmo sounds awful.
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Shitbirds of a feather…
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It was that “everything online must be social media” period of time, I guess.
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Not only did they make all transactions public by default, they also make your “friends” list public as a completely different setting.
I consider myself pretty savvy about these things, and definitely set my transactions all to be private the moment I signed up for Venmo (because I agree that I have zero interest in having other people know who I’m transacting with). But this Wired article made me go double-check my settings, and I found that even though the big “DEFAULT PRIVACY SETTINGS” was set to “Private,” that if I scrolled down and clicked on “Friends List” at the bottom of the screen, that was still set to public! I immediately texted my most privacy-minded friend, and he had the exact same settings as me. I bet 99% of Venmo users (even those who set their transactions to public) still have public friends list.
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