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BuzzFeed Found Joe Biden’s ‘Secret’ Venmo Account Within 10 Minutes

The payment app desperately needs to up its privacy game, say experts.

After noticing a brief mention in The New York Times that President Joe Biden uses a Venmo account to send money to his grandchildren, a team of BuzzFeed News journalists were able to track down Biden’s account within 10 minutes, the outlet reported. Although users can opt to keep their individual transactions private, there’s no way to lock down an account’s friends list. The president’s profile inadvertently revealed a network of connections made up of his family members, personal acquaintances, and senior White House officials, as well as all of their own contacts—something BuzzFeed described as “a national security issue for the United States, and a major privacy concern for everyone who uses the popular peer-to-peer payments app.”

As Vahid Behzadan, director of the Secure and Assured Intellect Learning Lab at the University of New Haven, told BuzzFeed, “If somebody wanted to map out the activities of the first family they could just look at their activities on the social network and figure out what the family is up to by looking at what the what their associates are doing. I assume that the extended associates like friends, grandchildren don’t enjoy the same level of security as the first family and so, so it may be easier to monitor them passively through their network.”