What you're agreeing to

Venmo, owned by PayPal, makes transactions public by default — your payment history is visible to anyone unless you manually set each transaction to private. PayPal can restrict your Venmo account without notice.

Privacy in plain English

Venmo collects your transaction history, device data, and social connections. By default all transactions are public on Venmo's social feed, which has been used by researchers to infer sensitive information about users including political donations and personal relationships.

Terms of Service: Breakdown

Concerning Clauses

• - Venmo transactions are set to public by default, exposing your payment history and social connections to anyone.
• PayPal can restrict your Venmo account without notice, making your balance inaccessible.
• The arbitration clause prevents class-action lawsuits; disputes are resolved individually.

Data Sharing

• - Your transaction data and social connections are shared with PayPal's advertising and analytics infrastructure.
• Venmo's public transaction feed is accessible to third parties and data scrapers via API.

Known Incidents

• - 2021: Researchers scraped Venmo's public API to expose President Biden's social connections, demonstrating how public transactions can map personal relationships at scale.

Privacy Policy: Breakdown

Privacy Issues

• - Venmo's social design defaults to making your payments and their notes publicly visible, which can reveal sensitive information.
• Venmo infers your social network and relationships from payment history, creating a social graph that PayPal monetizes.

Who Gets Your Data

• - Transaction data feeds PayPal's advertising network for targeted campaigns. - Venmo's public API has historically allowed mass scraping of user transactions by third parties.

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