From NYpost.com….
Venmo is finally ditching a notoriously controversial and unsettling feature — the ability to see strangers’ transactions.
The PayPal-owned app — which rocketed to success by combining easy mobile payments with elements of social media — revealed Tuesday that it’s axing its “global feed” that had allowed customers to see payments between other users even if they had no connections in common.
Venmo, which has more than 70 million users worldwide, had taken flak from privacy advocates for years over the global feed feature, as well as the fact that it publicly displays users’ friends.
In 2018, a coder and privacy researcher created a Twitter account that posted public transactions from Venmo — including what were apparently payments for drugs and requests for cash from sugar daddies, Vice reported. The researcher said the purpose of the project was to show how much information Venmo users were inadvertently sharing online.
