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Comment by dahdum | Hacker News Reader

This isn’t a security issue, Venmo is publishing this data by design. It’s already available for law enforcement, and they don’t need a Twitter bot. The bot was to inform the public.

Shaming Venmo into protecting their users or just raising public awareness about their policies is a great start.

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I think this is the right way to look at it. The twitter bot didn't give this information to law enforcement, because unless they're idiots they've been monitoring and archiving this from day one.

You might be suprised.

I would be, this is exactly the use case for Palantir's social media monitoring system. If they failed to pull in this data source that would be a huge miss. Especially since Palantir and PayPal (who now owns venmo) were co-founded by the same person.

I doubt they’ve been monitoring and archiving this from day one.

I agree that the data is already available, but to hurt the users without a second of hesitation? Much better and justified to go after the company, ... slowly step up the pressure and escalate it gradually until you have their attention. Tag their CxOs on LinkedIn, call them out in person (don't let them hide between a corporate facade) for their greedy negligence. Better would have been by publishing a paper about it imho ... But to hurt the user like this? The author is a flipping coward.

As the author mentioned there have already been papers published about this but they got nowhere near the same attention. If you are actually concerned about the users of venmo you should be thanking the author he managed to bring major security issues to the attention of far more users then anyone else working on this same issue has been able to. And as others have noted venmo already shares everything with law enforcement, so there is no issue here with exposing people to increased legal risk.

It's available, but in many cases agencies are unaware that this data exists. Drawing attention to it exposes people who made life errors to outsized retribution. I'm willing to bet a dollar many cases brought by smaller agencies would've escaped limitations had they not been raised.

I'm entirely sober, always have been. I still think this one-person campaign may have ruined innocent lives. Just because people may not understand the seriousness of a repercussion doesn't mean they should fall victim to those which are unfairly onerous; most people can't process risk the way we can.

It’d be naive to assume that agencies don’t know about Venmo considering its data has been used previously to prosecute drug dealers [1].

[1] https://qz.com/376634/the-euphemisms-people-use-to-pay-their...

It would be naive, you're right.

That's why I mentioned "many" and not "all"

The researcher isn't shaming Venmo, they're shaming the users.

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