Would You Show Me Your Bank Statement?

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13 years ago. March 2010. I'm at South by Southwest in Austin, and I meet this guy who's walking around. I think I made a comment about the fact he was wearing those Vibrams Five Finger shoes. We ended up striking up a conversation. I asked what he's up to and it turns out he has created this peer-to-peer money transfer system, and it's called venmo. He asked if I'd be interested in it, and I said "yeah, sure."

He asked me for my phone number. I gave it to him, and next thing I know he's basically texted me some money. He says "if you send it to anybody else, like in 10 cent increments, I'll send you some more money. We're just trying to spread the word on Venmo."

Fast forward to today and everybody (well, not everybody - I still meet people that don't) but a lot of people are using Venmo. It's huge. In fact, Venmo is one of the reasons that I didn't pay attention to Bitcoin in the very beginning because I was thinking "what's the point? why do I need Bitcoin? Crypto doesn't make sense. We've got Venmo. We've got PayPal." (that's another story...)

Now, one of the things that I see people still to this day get wrong after this thing has been around for over a decade is that most people have no idea that they are over sharing all of their transaction data. Nobody would go out in public and show people their bank statement, but that's essentially what you're doing with Venmo unless you've changed the default settings.

The default in Vimeo is to show anybody your transactions.

If you haven't done this then you need to check.

1. Go into the Venmo app. Click on where it says "Me" at the bottom.
2. Go up to the top where there's that little cog for the settings.
3. Go into privacy.
4. Hide all transactions or make all transactions private.
**if you want to go an extra step you can go change all past transactions to be private as well

Boom! It's done. It's as simple as that. I don't know why they made it default to show the world, which is crazy. I still to this day, 13 years later, am texting people "hey you may want to check your privacy settings" because it's pretty prevalent.

So you go do the same (right now!) and I'll check you next time.

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• I gave the 2023 MIT Commencement Speech
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• Why ai Will Save the World
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• The First 3 Hours of Your Day Can Dictate How Your Life Turns Out
  - Srinivas Rao