Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
I’m currently looking at my Venmo feed. In an ideal world, I would see only a log of private payments I’ve made and received. Instead, I see a list of my friends’ business: someone paid a friend for “drinkies,” another for “rich bitch things.” Because we don’t live in an ideal world — we live in a society where a popular payment app will expose a Supreme Court justice’s potential conflicts of interest because someone else forgot to lock down their privacy settings.
The most recent example of poor Venmo security comes from Rajan Vasisht, a former aide to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. The Guardian tracked down Vasisht’s Venmo account and found several payments in 2019 from lawyers who had been Thomas’ legal clerks. The amount of…