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If you’ve ever used Venmo, you know that the app defaults to showing your transactions publicly. That means everyone knows when you’ve sent a friend $5 for pizza or an Uber ride home. What users don’t know is that anyone can make their transactions private. Last year, former Mozilla fellow Hang Do Thi Duc published “Public By Default, ” a compilation of 207 million Venmo transactions. Now, another person has gathered millions of people’s Venmo transactions to prove that — a year later — nothing on the app has changed. Computer science student, Dan Salmon scraped seven million transactions during six months, TechCrunch reported . Salmon downloaded transactions through the company’s developer API . He didn’t need users’ permission or even the app to do so. “There’s truly no reason to have this API open to unauthenticated requests,” Salmon told TechCrunch. “The API only exists to provide like a scrolling feed of public transactions for the home page of the app, but if that’s your goal...
Venmo, the mobile payment service owned by PayPal that lets users send money to friends, is increasing its Instant Transfer fee to 1 percent. The Instant Transfer features allowed Venmo users to send their account balances directly to their Mastercard or Visa debit cards within 30 minutes for a 25 cent flat fee. The standard transfer which takes one to three business days will remain free. Joshua Perrin, a Washington, D.C. resident, said he started using Venmo in September when his apartment burned down, specifically for the 25-cent fee. “I was getting huge donations. Some were several hundred to $1,000, so it made sense to only have to spend a quarter to have instant access to the money,” Perrin said. Perrin said that now that the fee has increased, there is no advantage to using Venmo over its competitor Cash App which also has a 1 percent fee for instant deposits. In June, Venmo announced that it is releasing a debit card for its users. Venmo competitor Square began releasing...