Andrew Kortina
Co-Founder and CFO Venmo.1
About
Venmo is an American mobile payment service founded in 2009 and owned by PayPal since 2013. Venmo is aimed at users who wish to split their bills or pay a business. Account holders can transfer funds to others via a mobile phone app. Account holders must be residents of the United States. Venmo also operates as a small social network, as users can observe other users' public transactions with posts and emoticons. In 2021, the company handled US$230 billion in transactions and generated US$850 million in revenue.
By default, Venmo publishes every peer-to-peer transaction (excluding the amount), a feature shown by researchers to reveal sensitive details about users' lives in some situations. In 2018, the company settled with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) about several privacy and security violations related to this and other features, and made changes to the corresponding settings. However, Venmo continued to attract criticism for exposing users to possible privacy risks.
From Wikipedia’s article on Andrew Kortina, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.2
Companies
Early life and education
- Date not recordedUniversity of Pennsylvania3
Career
Occupation: businessperson.5
Legal issues and controversies
Privacy concerns
A 2018 study analyzed over 200 million public transactions and found that Venmo "reveals a massive amount of private details about users' lives by default". The same year, the company reached a settlement with the FTC after the FTC had accused Venmo of "misleading" users about the privacy settings changes required to make transactions completely private. In 2019, another researcher downloaded and analyzed seven million transactions, concluding that although Venmo had made some very minor improvements limiting mass-scraping, the data still put users at risk for various forms of cyber attacks.
In 2019, Mozilla and the Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote an open letter "to express our deep concern about Venmo's disregard for the importance of user privacy, and to call on Venmo to make two critical changes to its privacy settings: make transactions private by default, and give users privacy settings for their friend lists".
Venmo's social model has attracted attention from researchers. A research group from University of Washington observed in 2017 that the social feed in Venmo differs from other social networks in that activity is driven by financial transactions. A user could make a trivial transaction to make a post (e.g., sending someone $0.01, or requesting $0.02), but only one participant in their studies reported ever doing this. Further, neither reading the feed nor sharing a transaction memo publicly or with friends is necessary to send or receive money.
On Venmo, people transact with both friends and businesses via the app. Analysis of public transactions identifies a spectrum of use patterns, from regular users who create transactions for a variety of expenses, to niche users who use Venmo with a small cluster of friends to pay for just a few things (e.g., bills among roommates).
A May 2021 investigation by BuzzFeed News reportedly managed to find the Venmo account of United States president Joe Biden after "less than 10 minutes of looking for it"; BuzzFeed News additionally states that the Venmo app "leaves everyone... in the world exposed" and states that it reveals a major privacy concern.
In 2022, Rajat Tandon and Jelena Mirkovic from the University of Southern California, along with their research collaborators, showcased that 2 in 5 Venmo users publicly reveal sensitive information. Their work, "I know what you did on Venmo: Discovering privacy leaks in mobile social payments", which presents multiple findings from 389 million public transaction Venmo notes, highlights serious risks from a public-by-default policy for mobile social payments.
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Consumer Financial Protection Bureau probe
Venmo came under scrutiny from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in 2021 over the company's treatment of their customers owing money for transactions. PayPal, the company operating Venmo's platform, announced through a regulatory filing in February that it had received a civil investigative demand from the CFPB "related to Venmo's unauthorized funds transfers and collections processes, and related matters." Venmo has a history of using aggressive tactics to threaten debt-owing users, ranging from seizing the funds from the user's other PayPal accounts to sending debt collectors after users. Customer service emails showed the company notifying users it could involve a collection agency over debts from $3,000 to as low as $7 in 2019, in some instances even when the customer in question had been scammed. Such practices continued during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Automated security flagging
Customers have filed complaints regarding Venmo's automated security flagging system, which freezes or deletes accounts with little to no explanation. The company does not share its decision-making process for these restrictions, even with the affected users, and lacks an official appeals process.
From Wikipedia’s article on Andrew Kortina (this version), CC BY-SA 4.0.
Sources
The numbers on this page point here. Each one links to the record it came from.
- 1WikidataAndrew Kortina on Wikidata
- 2WikipediaAndrew Kortina on Wikipedia
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- 6WikidataVenmo, Founder