Do you use Venmo? Your transactions are public by default. Here’s how to change that.

Venmo, the popular person-to-person money transfer service owned by PayPal, is back in the news again after a computer science student named Dan Salmon created a website profiling several of the millions of Venmo users who use the service to send and receive payments.

The reason Salmon was able to do this is because in Venmo, transaction histories are public by default. That’s right… public.

Unless you’ve specifically configured your privacy settings to hide transactions, your Venmo activity is an open book.

As Zack Whittaker of TechCrunch bluntly put it, using Venmo’s API (automated programming interface), “anyone can look at an entire user’s public transaction history, who they shared money with, when, and in some cases for what reason — including illicit goods and substances.”

Now — yes, now — would be a very good time to check your Venmo privacy settings and make sure your transaction history is set to Private. Again, this is NOT the default setting in Venmo. It should be, but it isn’t. If you want to protect your privacy, then you need to take action!

If you have the Venmo app, you can use this visual guide created by Salmon to adjust your privacy settings.

You can also adjust your privacy settings through the Venmo website. Go here and select the Private option. Then click the button under Past Payments that says “Change All to Private”. This will make that same setting retroactive to your past transactions. Here’s a visual guide:

Change your Venmo privacy settings