EXCLUSIVE— P2P payment app Venmo will make live changes to its privacy policy starting Thursday, March 29. Among those updates, Venmo is clarifying how it uses consumer data.
These updates come a month after Venmo parent company, PayPal reached a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on claims that Venmo failed to disclose information and misled costumers on security and privacy matters. It also closely follows a number of revelations about Facebook’s leaky and opaque data management.
Among the issues raised by FTC was Venmo’s auto-friending feature, its default setting that makes a user’s transaction public as well as misleading the consumer on “the extent to which consumers’ financial accounts were protected by ‘bank grade security systems.”
In this updated policy, Venmo is trying to clarify all that.
For starters, it informs the users of the type of information it collects from that user. This information includes bank account login info, bank account and routing numbers, credit cards linked to the Venmo account, machine or mobile device identification number, geo-location, time zone, and the list goes on. Check out what else is on that list here.
Venmo also clarifies that is does not sell (or share) any information to third-party services for marketing purposes: but that information is shared with PayPal and all parties under the PayPal umbrella. A user’s information can also be shared with financial service companies and merchants, but only at the request of the user.
It also reiterates that Venmo connects to a user’s Facebook, and while Venmo says that all the data is protected by “physical, electronic and procedural safeguards in compliance with applicable US federal and state regulations,” it does not explain how that data is impacted when breaches to such connected platforms (hint: Facebook) occur.
Over the course of the week, Venmo has been notifying users of the change to policy via email. Haven’t received an email, yet? Well, Venmo still has two more days to go before March 29.
Or just reach out to Venmo. They may or may not respond. (I’m still waiting…)
Check out the whole policy update here.
Venmo currently has 10 million active monthly users, according to a previous Bank Innovation report.






