This Bot Tweets Photos and Names of People Who Bought 'Drugs' on Venmo
Found on Motherboard on Sunday, 22 July 2018
A new bot called “Who’s buying drugs on Venmo” tweets the usernames and photos of Venmo users who have marked their transaction with a particular drug keyword or emoji.
The bot also potentially exposes people in ways they didn’t originally anticipate, touching on issues of consent and privacy.
Venmo, owned by PayPal, is a social-network-mobile-payment-service crossover, allowing users to easily and quickly send money to each other. Users can make all their transactions and activity private, but by default, Venmo publicly presents the username, name, photo, and message sent with the money within the service’s app for others to see.
You have to ask why a service would, by default, make your transaction details possible; but hey, it's Paypal and that's pretty much the kind of crap you can expect from this company. They should get a big lawsuit for violating basic privacy rules.