This week, Venmo took a long overdue step toward privacy by eliminating its global social feed in its latest redesign. That’s good! Now you can no longer witness an endless stream of complete strangers sending money to and from one another. But privacy advocates say that until Venmo makes every transaction private by default, it’s still a liability for users who may not realize they have to dig through the settings to hide their Venmo lives from others.
Amnesty International and a consortium of researchers and media organizations this week published a major investigation into the NSO Group, and Israel-based spyware vendor. The report alleges that governments have used NSO Group malware to spy on activists, journalists, politicians, and executives; the NSO Group issued multiple denials. Security researchers, meanwhile, see the revelations as evidence that they need more visibility into iOS and Android to better spot attacks like this, and prevent them going forward.