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I am very confused as to what the value proposition for venmo's social feature is. It's super creepy that by default someone can know all this information about me.

This just leads to creepy podcast fodder: https://gimletmedia.com/episode/4-follow-the-money/

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You can have a private, public among friends or completely public transaction if you choose. The ones you can see in this are only the ones that the person who initiated the transaction has choose to share publicly with the world.

I've not used Venmo... what is the default setting?

It looks like the default setting is public.

Public is the default. You can change it:

https://help.venmo.com/customer/portal/articles/1322627-how-...

Using the venmo api you can get an entire friends list of any user, all you need is their ID.

I was hoping this demo would have crawled all of venmo but it looks like it is querying the api in real time. Mine only got to 3 degrees

It automatically stops at 3 in the interests of not exploding your computer (I found that expanding all the way to 6 would cause my laptop's fan to kick on as it moved hundreds of nodes around). You can keep expanding by clicking the button in the top left. (Click cancel if it's stuck).

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