If you found yourself splitting a check at a restaurant, you probably realized there aren’t a lot of privacy-respecting alternatives to Venmo or Zelle in the U.S. As for Venmo, it keeps a long record of public, and potentially embarrassing transactions.
The Signalgate scandal has led to journalists discovering the public Venmo transactions of many Trump administration staffers. Most likely, this is because their contact information is synced with the platform.
A number of top Trump administration officials—including four who were on a now-infamous Signal group chat—appear to have Venmo accounts that have been leaking data, including contacts and in some cases transactions, to the public. Experts say this is a potentially serious counterintelligence problem that could allow foreign intelligence services to gain insight into a target’s social network or even identify individuals who could be paid or coerced to act against them.
All this information can create a good timeline of a person throughout the years. Even if you haven’t used something like Venmo or Cashapp in a while, make sure to delete your transaction history if possible.
Some of the information revealed by the accounts is quite granular. McCormack and the accounts that appear to belong to Katz and Ortagus, for example, left not only their contact lists publicly visible but also their transactions, which are as recent as last autumn. These records reveal specific information like a 2018 payment from Katz with a note consisting solely of an eggplant emoji and how much he paid an overnight cat sitter in 2019. They also reveal McCormack’s contributions to what appears to be a get-together for veterans of the Bush-Cheney administration (“Cheney team reunion! Thank you!!”), who has reimbursed Ortagus for picnic expenses, and Kent’s connection to noted conspiracy theorist Ivan Raiklin, who calls himself “the secretary of retribution” and once created a deep state target list.
That got me thinking, how would you split a bill or send payments to someone who isn’t so privacy-aware? Cash is the obvious answer here, but many business are card-only.
Now the next issue is convincing said friend to pay with cash.
Most of the issues around this is social, not technical. In the real world, I haven’t really encountered a situation where a third-party app isn’t used at some point, even if cash was used to pay for the meal at first
At minimum, write gibberish for the transaction memo when using Venmo. Further, by default, Venmo transactions are public, and can be enabled to only be seen between recipient and the sender (doesn’t apply to groups..). There is even an option to set previous transactions to private. I also use Venmo without verifying my identity - I’m sure the bank account could be linked to me along with my number, but at least it isn’t my government ID.
I don’t really see why. It’s based on blind signatures and cryptography, so it’s going to have the same anonymity properties no matter who is in charge of it.
GNU Taler is cool, based on the same idea. You can absolutely have a central authority and also anonymous payments.
