The Daily Beast reported yesterday that in May 2018, Florida Representative Matt Gaetz may have paid for the sexual services of a teenager, when he sent his friend Joel Greenberg $900 via Venmo. It seems since payments made on Venmo are public by default, reporters were able to piece together that Greenberg then passed on three payments the next day to three different women with amounts also totaling $900.

Gaetz isn’t the first person to have his alleged vices showcased for all to see via this Venmo feature, just the most famous. And it may end up contributing to his downfall. Critics of the app’s design have long highlighted this public payment feature on Venmo as a “dark pattern,” a “user interface that has been carefully crafted to trick users into doing things, such as buying insurance with their purchase or signing up for recurring bills.” Consumer Reports even used Venmo’s feature as an example in a story on “How to spot manipulative dark patterns online.”

I use Venmo myself regularly to buy delicious jalapeño and cheddar biscuits from a vendor at our local farmers’ market on Sunday mornings. It’s a ritual. And a vice, I suppose, though a legal one.

Venmo payment screenshot

Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like when I make a payment for these tasty biscuits. Note that field at bottom right is “Public” by default. I habitually change that setting to “Private.” There’s another setting for “Friends.”

“Why’s that such a big deal?” you might ask. “I’ve got nothing to hide.” And that’s likely true for the scores of people making pedestrian payments for pizza or donuts or to split an Uber.

But what if you’re buying pot or pills or shrooms—and not the kind you want on a pizza? Well, people often make these charges publicly, too. As far back as 2015, Mike Lacher and Chris Baker leveraged public payments like these to create a site called vicemo, which showcased “a collection of real, publicly available Venmo transactions involving drugs, booze, and sex.” Vicemo seems to have stopped publishing new transactions a year or so ago but it highlighted the privacy issues around Venmo’s feature.

Screenshot from vicemo

Similarly, in 2018 a Twitter account named @venmodrugs appeared, which posted similar transactions, proclaimed itself a bot, and suggested, “I’m sure these people are joking.” (Of course, many of them probably were.) “This is all for fun,” the creator said, “but consider setting your transactions to private.” The account’s creator, a software engineer named Joel Guerra, wrote a piece for Medium explaining why he shut the bot down after only 24 hours but also why he created it:

People understood my point and I had sparked a lot of discussion about online privacy and the need for users to do a better job of understanding the terms of software they were using — and a lot of discussion about how companies need to do a better job of informing customers how their data was being used.

Screenshot of the short-lived @venmodrugs account

If you have little sympathy for folks who publish their drug, sex, and alcohol transactions publicly—in jest or otherwise—consider the fact that this Venmo feature, also potentially enables or enflames stalkers. One Cosmopolitan writer covered this aspect of the app somewhat jokingly, suggesting “Venmo Is the Absolute Best App for Creep-Stalking Your Ex.” A 2018 Bloomberg piece even suggested parents track their children’s shenanigans by stalking them there. People have also discovered their partners were cheating via their Venmo transactions.

I got “confirmshamed” changing my Venmo settings while writing this article. Screenshot: 4/9/21 12:22 am

As Consumer Reports noted, however, these same dynamics could provoke someone’s ex to harass them if they see transactions made to a new love interest. Their same article noted the “obstacle course” you had to navigate to changes these default privacy settings, too. In fact, to this day, Venmo prompts you to ask if you really, really want to change the setting, before you can successfully change it, reminding you that “you can change the privacy setting for each payment individually.” Still want to proceed? You have to guiltily mash “Change Anyway.” This, too, qualifies as a dark pattern. It’s been dubbed “confirmshaming.”

Whatever deserved fate befalls Matt Gaetz aside, this public payment default remains a feature Venmo has long been criticized for. And given the opportunities it presents for abuse, they really still need to fix it.

@stribs

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