Anonymous wrote:We had to take my FIL's phone and delete several apps and disable 98% of notifications. Some people just think you use the phone and apps the way they come. Their phones are dinging loudly every time the Gap advertises a sale. It is an insane way to live.
OP here and that I would understand. But all the people I see public on Venmo are younger (under age 50) and tech savvy. Some I know have private/locked down Instagram and Facebook accounts, so they are clearly aware of privacy concerns online.
Also, I don't use Venmo often. Like 6x a year when I sell something on a list serve or a friend buys tickets to a concert. But the people I see who are public appear to use the app often because it's always the same names over and over. It seems bizarre to me that you would be regularly using Venmo to reimburse friends and coworkers for things but be unaware that the activity is being publicly broadcast on the app to the point that many of your regular social habits, the people you interact with frequently, what home services you employ, the fact that you have kids, etc., are all laid out online.
Given the scammers out there who will scrape the internet for personal info they can use to try and scam people out of their money, this seems totally insane to me. A scammer could see that you have coffee with a specific person every Tuesday (and see the first and last name of that person), and could impersonate them to try and bait you into something. I've gotten scam attempts in my work email where people have posed as colleagues whose names they clearly obtained from our company website, for instance. Imagine getting a text and the name on the screen is someone you know referencing something real (like a recent coffee meet up) -- you would probably trust it implicitly without checking the number.
It seems so dangerous.
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