July 19, 2018 • 19 mins
We have another Russian agent in our midst. For nearly 5 years a 29 year old Russian political science student was a fixture at many important conservative events. Maria Butina is accused of conspiring to set up a back channel of communication between the Kremlin and the Republican party using the NRA as a conduit. Lauren Meier, reporter for Axios, joins us to discuss who Butina is and how she infiltrated influential political circles. Next, with the rise of money transfer apps such as Venmo, once again, you better check those privacy settings. Venmo’s default privacy setting is set to “public,” which means all your transactions are visible to everyone. Xavier Harding, reporter for Mic, joins us to talk about hiding all those payments to your friends for Uber rides and burgers. Finally, you’ve heard it before, watch what you post online. In this case, be careful posting bad reviews of your doctor online, because they might fight back! Jayne O’Donnell, reporter for USA Today joins us to talk about doctors and hospitals suing patients for posting negative reviews and why it’s almost always an uphill battle.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
It's Thursday July and this is the daily Dive. We
have another Russian agent in our midst. For nearly five years,
a twenty nine year old Russian political science student was
a fixture at many important conservative events. Maria Boutina is
accused of conspiring to set up a back channel of
communication between the Kremlin and the Republican Party, using the
(00:25):
n r A as a conduit. Lauren Meyer, reporter for Axios,
joins us to discuss who Boutina is and how she
infiltrated influential political circles. Next, with the rise of money
transfer apps such as Venmo, once again you better check
those privacy settings. Venmo's default privacy setting is set to public,
which means all your transactions are visible to everyone. Xavier Hearting,
(00:49):
reporter for Mike, joins us to talk about hiding all
those payments to your friends for uber rides and burgers. Finally,
you've heard it before, watch what you post online. In
this case, be careful posting bad reviews of your doctor
online because they might fight back. Jane o'donnald, reporter for
USA Today, joined us to talk about doctors and hospitals
(01:10):
suing patients for posting negative reviews and why it's almost
always an uphill battle. It's news without the noise. Let's
dive in, will be your phone? Polite politics, especially even
in the relationships with my country, and do you want
to continue the politics of the sound schous. I believe
(01:30):
I would get along very nicely with cot okay, and
I mean when we have the strength. I don't think
you need the sand students. I think that we would
get along very very well. Joining us now is Lauren Meyer,
reporter for Axios. We have a new Russian agent in
our midst. Her name is Maria Boutina. She's a young,
twenty nine year old Redhead. She was just charged a
(01:52):
couple of days ago being a Russian agent. She was
on a year's long mission to build ties between Russia,
the n r A, the Republican Party. She has possible
ties to a few different unnamed Americans. At this point,
what can you tell us about Maria Boutina? As you mentioned,
she's a twenty nine year old Russian national and was
arrested on Sunday and later indicted on criminal charges of
(02:16):
conspiracy and acting as a foreign agent. According to this
FBI AFFI dated she is accused of working to develop
back channel communications the China, the Russian government, and the
Republican Party, as well as the Trump campaign. She allegedly
worked on this operation with her mentor, Alexander Torsion, who's
also under investigation by the FBI's Torsion is a lifetime
(02:39):
member at the n r A and attended exclusive NIRA
events with Boutina. He's also allegedly an associate of Russian
President Vladimir Putin. And how do they say she was
infiltrating all these groups? Because she got very involved in
the n r A, but she also was attending other
conservative events like a c pack and a few other ones.
(03:00):
How did she get involved with all these groups? The
Washington Post reported earlier this week that the FBI tracked
her movements rather than a question her, which is not
wildly uncommon when dealing with allegations against the foreign national
She apparently attended a ball at Trump's inauguration and tried
to arrange a meeting between him and a Russian government
(03:21):
official at last year's National Prayer Breakfast. She also has
a history that appeals to many Trump Republicans. She allegedly
grew up hunting in the wilderness in Russia, but eventually
moved to Moscow, where she began a career in public
relations and founded a group called the Right to Their
Arms to advocate for the loosening of Russia's quite restrictive
(03:42):
gun laws. That's how she was building that relationship with
the n r A. And then there she met an
American his name was Paul Ericson, who was a South
Dakota based Republican who really took it this next step
that he was seen with her. They started a romantic
relationship even and he was the next part of getting
her into all these other circles, right. She allegedly attempted
(04:05):
to offer various relationships in exchange for a position with
this organization that she targeted, and this is likely one
of the biggest intrigues for the US is that she
tried to gain access to a network of US political influencers.
Like cultivating these personal relationships with this Republican political operative
who was also involved in the effort to arrange a
(04:28):
meeting between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. It really
just points to how sophisticated the Russian machine is. We've
been doing a lot of stories obviously about the Russian
meddling in the election, and there was just an indictment
of twelve Russian agents on the cyber hacking front. But
this is another front. You know, She's over here trying
to make in person relationships, trying to steer policies, American
(04:51):
policies towards more favorable conditions for Russia. Absolutely, and it's
really important to note that walk Friday's indictments came from
the Special Council. These charges against Bhutina came from the
Justice Department's National Security Division as well as the U. S.
Attorney's Office in d C. But the bottom line is
that also these aren't directly linked. These covert activities over
(05:13):
the past five years really highlight another component of Russia's
massive influence operation in the US. There's also a congressman
that might be involved, not necessarily involved in helping her
do anything, but as you said, they set up her
and her mentor Torsion were setting up a lot of trips.
There was a congressional delegation that made a trip to
(05:34):
Moscow in and represented Dana roar Backer was kind of
alluded to in the indictments but not named. He was
one of the people that took a meeting with her
and with Torsion as well. A lot of these new
details reveal a very tangled web of meticulous coordination with
Russian officials, including a primary Russian security agency and Russian
(05:55):
oligarch set date back to at least two thousand thirteen.
These documents show that she worked under the direction of
a high ranking Russian official to arrange introductions to people
in the US that have influence on American politics, such
as Congressman. These court documents also indicates that the primary
avenue of influence for both Putina and as I mentioned earlier,
(06:16):
Alexander Torsion was the National Rifle Association. Her lawyer has
said that she's just a student with interest in guns,
and that's why all this stuff kind of came to be.
But they have Twitter conversations, they have emails between Maria
Boutina and her Russian operatives that she was talking to,
and they even in conversations going back that you've step
(06:37):
upstaged Anna Chapman, who was another Russian agent who was
arrested a few years ago, and they said for people
asking you for your autographs, yet elevating her prosecutors even
said this leads us to believe that she's on par
with other covert Russian agents that we've caught before. On
top of that, and because of all those reasons, Fevereral
prosecutors say that she has a serious flight risk and
should be held without bail where she's currently away eating
(07:00):
until her trial. This court filing cites the nature of
these charges, her history of deceptive conduct, the potential sentences
she faces, the strong evidence of guilt. I could go
on and none, but all of this adds evidence of
her being a flight risk. With all this news of
other indictments and everything, it just proves how big the
Russian apparatus is to really try to influence things here
(07:22):
in America. Lauren Meyer, reporter for Axios, thank you very
much for all that. Thank you. Study actually noted some
of the most interesting Venmo users, which they call the
humans of Venmo. She noticed the drug dealers and one
person they called the Yellowist, and they were just eating
and drinking so much soda and pizza. Joining us now
(07:45):
is Xavier Harding, reporter for Mike. There's been a huge
rise in money transfer apps Zell, a couple of other ones.
One of the main ones I think one of the
o G s is Venmo. I use Venmo. It's it's
great for ending people money when you don't have cash
on you. But there's this interesting thing that happens. We
talk a lot about privacy and your data on this podcast,
(08:08):
and Venmo does something interesting. There are default setting with
your profile is always set to public, so whenever you're
sending money, everybody can see it. Really tell us a
little bit more about that, sure, So a researcher name
Hong Do the took she was the one who pointed
this out recently. She's a researcher based in Berlin. She's
(08:29):
a former Mozilla fellow. She noticed that you know, Venmo
is public by default. There are three options, Private so
no one can see your transaction. You have friends only,
so only your friends and the friends of the person
you're sending money to consider transaction. And then there's public,
so anybody with an Internet connection consider your transaction. So
that's the option that Venmo sets everyone to buy default.
(08:51):
If you never go into the settings up the setting
section of your Venmo account, all your transaction they're just
out there. So she noticed this and she found the
site that you can use to just see all the
incoming transactions. They are going through memo one time, and
she cataloged them all. She all the of all the
transactions in seen. She took a note of over two millions.
She pointing out the fact that you can notice interesting
(09:14):
patterns when you kind of look at all the transactions
at one I'm not always on the Venmo app, but
when I use it, I always take a little bit
of time to kind of scroll through what people are doing.
It's kind of one of my favorite things to do
because it's it's fun. You get to see what people
are paying each other for, and very much so with
noticing patterns or even to a smaller extent, just those
one time transactions that you see. I have my app
(09:36):
open right now. People that I don't know, you know,
they have their comments. So so one is an emoji
of a movie ticket, so they paid somebody back for
getting them their movie. A cell phone and the little
money flying emoji, you know, payment for my cell phone bill,
house payments, people put electric bill. You know. You can
tell all this stuff that people are paying each other for,
(09:57):
and you can use it to deduce path items about people,
learn more about people. But that's not it because there's
a lot of your public data that you don't know
you're giving away. Especially with Venmo. It links a lot
of times to your Facebook profile and things like that.
So I control around for a while and find out
a lot about you, and you will never know who
(10:17):
I am exactly. I think one thing is interesting is
that you know, to sign up for Venmo, one option
you have is to link your Facebook account, and the
Facebook account profile photo shows up in this public website
where you can just view all the transactions if you
have it linked. So if you can look at the
first name and last name, which are also available on
this public site, and then you can also look at
(10:37):
the Facebook profile photo, you can go to Facebook cross
reference the name with the photo, and then learn way
more about a person. Just from having those two pieces
of information. You can find out where they live more accurately,
the area they reside and maybe not the address, as
well as you know their interests, who else they're talking
to and hanging out with. The study is really interesting
to study actually noted some of the most interesting Venmo users,
(10:59):
which they call the human of Venmo. She noticed the
drug dealers and one person they called the yellowest Yellow
as you know, you only live once, and they were
just eating and drinking so much soda and pizza, and
to the point where it calls him the question enough
an insurance company sta all this, could it possibly give
you higher rates of life insurance if they knows how
(11:19):
poorly you're eating. You're giving that information out publicly, so
it's not like you can say later, well, I was
kidding or something like that. It's like, no, well, you
know you saw all of your transactions. Basically, that's a
huge plant. I think the fact that you know this
data becomes public. Once that gets out there, you can't
put that genie back in the bottle. There was a
Wall Street Journal article also recently made that takes into
(11:41):
account some of this stuff. It says, if you make
a mistake in payment to somebody, also good luck getting
that back. It's the simplest typing one letter off on
a person's name and then boom, you sent it to
the wrong person. And they talk about this person who
got a mistake in payment from somebody, and then decided
to go and investigate a little bit, and they found
out that the person sent them a payment mistakenly. They
(12:03):
researched them like as you said, you know it links
back to a Facebook. You can find out more details
from them. They had made payment to another person for
a quote unquote lesbian game. Later on they were kind
of embarrassed about and they were trying to demand the
money back, and you just got to be very careful
with all this stuff. Luckily, Vemo put some measures in
place so that there's at least a little bit of
friction when you're paying some money to a new user
(12:24):
who's not part of your contact list, And luckily for them,
they're able to get the money back if the recipient
did not already cash out. And when you're using these apps,
you have to take the utmost care, especially when I
have to do with your money. It's a simple fix.
The author of the study public by default. They used
then most publicly available information to track all the transactions
(12:46):
of all these users. What do we do to protect ourselves?
One thing that users can do to protect themselves is
very easy. To go into your Vemo app, hit the
little hamburger menu on the top left, and then you
go to settings at the bottom under the privacy section,
hitting that privacy button. You see you know, public friends, private,
private friends. Take it off a public Do not let
(13:07):
the Internet see your transactions because who knows what that
data could be used for down the road, right or
what creeps are just trying to look who you're paying
and what you're paying for. And keep to yourself exactly.
Xavier Harding, reporter for Mike, thank you very much for
joining us, figure of spur at Risk. I would recommend
(13:29):
to anybody to be very careful when they're posting, because
even if they aren't defaming the doctor or the hospital,
they are still putting themselves at risk of being sued.
Joining us now is Jane O'Donnell. She covers healthcare policy
for USA Today. With the rise of social media, you
can go onto sites like Yelp and get reviews for
(13:50):
just about anything. In this case, people are reviewing their
doctors and hospitals, and doctors are fighting back on patients
who are posting negative comments. There's a bunch of sites
rate m D health grades. You can use Google reviews, Yelp,
as I said, and people can post whatever they want. Basically,
tell us a little bit about doctors fighting back against
(14:11):
these negative comments. Right, Perhaps understandablieve, particularly if you have
anyone in the medical field in your family. You can
imagine that that it must make them quite unhappy if
they have a particularly disgruntled patient who is spending a
lot of time what they consider harassing. What the patient
might think is only fair because they've had such a
bad experience. So you can understand why the doctor or
(14:33):
the hospital might be unhappy with this. But think about
it from the other perspective, or both perspectives. In fact,
the patient who's been injured or got just very bad service. Yeah,
there's not a lot of places you can really go
to express your displeasure other than social media. I mean,
you go to all those places because it's easy. It's
easy to write a review, and it's easy to say, hey,
if I went in for this and and they gave
(14:55):
me subpar treatment. But as you said, you know a
lot of times these doctors in hospitals will fight back.
They'll sue you, or they'll try to get your comments removed.
Tell us about a few cases of doctors fighting back. Right,
These doctors and hospitals have far deeper pockets than most
of us, so when they want to come after patients,
they can really fight it out in court, and they
(15:17):
can afford the best lawyers their hospitals have a vested
interest in helping their doctors, so they're going after people
like retired Air Force Colonel David Antune. I became familiar
with David Antune last year. He had prostate cancer and
he had prostate cancer surgery. As many people know, one
of the side effects is in continence and impotence. He
(15:41):
alleges that the risks of that were very small and
that his doctor stated that he had more experience than
David said that his research shows that he did. And
he has also started posting documents that he says showed
that the doctor wasn't in the operating room during the
(16:01):
time of his surgery. He was. He was very injured
in addition to becoming incontinent and impotent. Um So this
dragged on in court for for almost ten years. He
has been in litigation with the Cleveland clinic and now
the doctor since then because he was a relentless poster
on social media, so they actually had him arrested. Criminal
(16:23):
charges were filed against him for first he was there
was a civil stalking protective order and then they said
that he violated that by posting on Yelp. He settled
last week. I was out in Cleveland, and they settled
what started as a couple of felonies and a misdemeanor,
facing up to a year in prison. They settled for
a hundred dollars in a minor misdemeanor. This is a
(16:44):
guy who never had one speeding ticket in his life.
And some of these other patients that we talked about.
Other cases involved a couple of different women who had
posted things about being unhappy with their nose jobs. In
both cases it were was nose jobs. And these doctors
are going after them, very wealthy plastic surgeons, because they
say it's it's done tremendous damage to their businesses. And
(17:06):
then there's a hospital in Michigan where they sued the
and this is a Facebook issue where two daughters and
a granddaughter of an elderly woman they say we're mistreated,
are being sued for what they posted on Facebook about
the hospital's treatment. What did legal experts say on how
to protect yourself? I mean, you have if you're posting something.
Opinions are okay, but you have to be factually correct
(17:26):
when you're stating something about the service that you've got. Yes,
so you're at risk. I would recommend to anybody to
be very careful when they're posting, because even if they
aren't defaming the doctor or the hospital, they are still
putting themselves at risk of being sued. And the doctors
and hospitals usually can't sue websites like Yelp and whatnot
(17:48):
because they're not liable for the postings of the users
all the time. So they're going to come after you.
They're going to come after the individual patients. Yeah, and
then they'll go after the site and say what them
that one of these posts has violated the site's terms,
which can be pretty friendly. And keep in mind that
a lot of these sites are they're depending on these
(18:09):
hospitals and doctors for advertising dollars, so you can imagine
who some of them might diede with in a dispute.
I WI should a patient go if they have a complaint, though,
I mean, like I said, a lot of times, somebody's
going to default to some of the social media or
a Yelp or something. Put that negative review out there,
said I was very unhappy. But where should they be
going first to express their displeasure. There's somebody who's been
(18:30):
a consumer reporter off and on for most of my career.
The most important thing right away is to talk to
the doctor, unless if you truly don't trust this person.
You know, if something is truly botched, you might want
to go above them to the hospital or to a
different doctor within the hospital, but you want to start
and see if they'll fix it for you. It's very
difficult to get an attorney to take a medical malpractice case,
(18:53):
but if you think you have a very strong case,
it's worth contacting one. Well. The recommendations always hold true.
Be careful what you post us on social media and
review sites, because they could always come back at you.
Jane O'Donnell, covering healthcare policy for USA Today, Thank you
very much for joining us. Sure my pleasure. All right,
that's it for today. Join us on social media at
(19:15):
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We love the feedback, so don't forget to leave us
a comment and give us a rating. Follow The Daily
Dive and I Heart Radio or subscribe wherever you get
your podcasts. The Daily Dive is produced by Miranda Mirando
and engineered by Tony Sarrantino. I'm Oscar and Mirrors in
Los Angeles, and this was your daily dive
It's Thursday July and this is the daily Dive. We
have another Russian agent in our midst. For nearly five years,
a twenty nine year old Russian political science student was
a fixture at many important conservative events. Maria Boutina is
accused of conspiring to set up a back channel of
communication between the Kremlin and the Republican Party, using the
(00:25):
n r A as a conduit. Lauren Meyer, reporter for Axios,
joins us to discuss who Boutina is and how she
infiltrated influential political circles. Next, with the rise of money
transfer apps such as Venmo, once again you better check
those privacy settings. Venmo's default privacy setting is set to public,
which means all your transactions are visible to everyone. Xavier Hearting,
(00:49):
reporter for Mike, joins us to talk about hiding all
those payments to your friends for uber rides and burgers. Finally,
you've heard it before, watch what you post online. In
this case, be careful posting bad reviews of your doctor
online because they might fight back. Jane o'donnald, reporter for
USA Today, joined us to talk about doctors and hospitals
(01:10):
suing patients for posting negative reviews and why it's almost
always an uphill battle. It's news without the noise. Let's
dive in, will be your phone? Polite politics, especially even
in the relationships with my country, and do you want
to continue the politics of the sound schous. I believe
(01:30):
I would get along very nicely with cot okay, and
I mean when we have the strength. I don't think
you need the sand students. I think that we would
get along very very well. Joining us now is Lauren Meyer,
reporter for Axios. We have a new Russian agent in
our midst. Her name is Maria Boutina. She's a young,
twenty nine year old Redhead. She was just charged a
(01:52):
couple of days ago being a Russian agent. She was
on a year's long mission to build ties between Russia,
the n r A, the Republican Party. She has possible
ties to a few different unnamed Americans. At this point,
what can you tell us about Maria Boutina? As you mentioned,
she's a twenty nine year old Russian national and was
arrested on Sunday and later indicted on criminal charges of
(02:16):
conspiracy and acting as a foreign agent. According to this
FBI AFFI dated she is accused of working to develop
back channel communications the China, the Russian government, and the
Republican Party, as well as the Trump campaign. She allegedly
worked on this operation with her mentor, Alexander Torsion, who's
also under investigation by the FBI's Torsion is a lifetime
(02:39):
member at the n r A and attended exclusive NIRA
events with Boutina. He's also allegedly an associate of Russian
President Vladimir Putin. And how do they say she was
infiltrating all these groups? Because she got very involved in
the n r A, but she also was attending other
conservative events like a c pack and a few other ones.
(03:00):
How did she get involved with all these groups? The
Washington Post reported earlier this week that the FBI tracked
her movements rather than a question her, which is not
wildly uncommon when dealing with allegations against the foreign national
She apparently attended a ball at Trump's inauguration and tried
to arrange a meeting between him and a Russian government
(03:21):
official at last year's National Prayer Breakfast. She also has
a history that appeals to many Trump Republicans. She allegedly
grew up hunting in the wilderness in Russia, but eventually
moved to Moscow, where she began a career in public
relations and founded a group called the Right to Their
Arms to advocate for the loosening of Russia's quite restrictive
(03:42):
gun laws. That's how she was building that relationship with
the n r A. And then there she met an
American his name was Paul Ericson, who was a South
Dakota based Republican who really took it this next step
that he was seen with her. They started a romantic
relationship even and he was the next part of getting
her into all these other circles, right. She allegedly attempted
(04:05):
to offer various relationships in exchange for a position with
this organization that she targeted, and this is likely one
of the biggest intrigues for the US is that she
tried to gain access to a network of US political influencers.
Like cultivating these personal relationships with this Republican political operative
who was also involved in the effort to arrange a
(04:28):
meeting between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. It really
just points to how sophisticated the Russian machine is. We've
been doing a lot of stories obviously about the Russian
meddling in the election, and there was just an indictment
of twelve Russian agents on the cyber hacking front. But
this is another front. You know, She's over here trying
to make in person relationships, trying to steer policies, American
(04:51):
policies towards more favorable conditions for Russia. Absolutely, and it's
really important to note that walk Friday's indictments came from
the Special Council. These charges against Bhutina came from the
Justice Department's National Security Division as well as the U. S.
Attorney's Office in d C. But the bottom line is
that also these aren't directly linked. These covert activities over
(05:13):
the past five years really highlight another component of Russia's
massive influence operation in the US. There's also a congressman
that might be involved, not necessarily involved in helping her
do anything, but as you said, they set up her
and her mentor Torsion were setting up a lot of trips.
There was a congressional delegation that made a trip to
(05:34):
Moscow in and represented Dana roar Backer was kind of
alluded to in the indictments but not named. He was
one of the people that took a meeting with her
and with Torsion as well. A lot of these new
details reveal a very tangled web of meticulous coordination with
Russian officials, including a primary Russian security agency and Russian
(05:55):
oligarch set date back to at least two thousand thirteen.
These documents show that she worked under the direction of
a high ranking Russian official to arrange introductions to people
in the US that have influence on American politics, such
as Congressman. These court documents also indicates that the primary
avenue of influence for both Putina and as I mentioned earlier,
(06:16):
Alexander Torsion was the National Rifle Association. Her lawyer has
said that she's just a student with interest in guns,
and that's why all this stuff kind of came to be.
But they have Twitter conversations, they have emails between Maria
Boutina and her Russian operatives that she was talking to,
and they even in conversations going back that you've step
(06:37):
upstaged Anna Chapman, who was another Russian agent who was
arrested a few years ago, and they said for people
asking you for your autographs, yet elevating her prosecutors even
said this leads us to believe that she's on par
with other covert Russian agents that we've caught before. On
top of that, and because of all those reasons, Fevereral
prosecutors say that she has a serious flight risk and
should be held without bail where she's currently away eating
(07:00):
until her trial. This court filing cites the nature of
these charges, her history of deceptive conduct, the potential sentences
she faces, the strong evidence of guilt. I could go
on and none, but all of this adds evidence of
her being a flight risk. With all this news of
other indictments and everything, it just proves how big the
Russian apparatus is to really try to influence things here
(07:22):
in America. Lauren Meyer, reporter for Axios, thank you very
much for all that. Thank you. Study actually noted some
of the most interesting Venmo users, which they call the
humans of Venmo. She noticed the drug dealers and one
person they called the Yellowist, and they were just eating
and drinking so much soda and pizza. Joining us now
(07:45):
is Xavier Harding, reporter for Mike. There's been a huge
rise in money transfer apps Zell, a couple of other ones.
One of the main ones I think one of the
o G s is Venmo. I use Venmo. It's it's
great for ending people money when you don't have cash
on you. But there's this interesting thing that happens. We
talk a lot about privacy and your data on this podcast,
(08:08):
and Venmo does something interesting. There are default setting with
your profile is always set to public, so whenever you're
sending money, everybody can see it. Really tell us a
little bit more about that, sure, So a researcher name
Hong Do the took she was the one who pointed
this out recently. She's a researcher based in Berlin. She's
(08:29):
a former Mozilla fellow. She noticed that you know, Venmo
is public by default. There are three options, Private so
no one can see your transaction. You have friends only,
so only your friends and the friends of the person
you're sending money to consider transaction. And then there's public,
so anybody with an Internet connection consider your transaction. So
that's the option that Venmo sets everyone to buy default.
(08:51):
If you never go into the settings up the setting
section of your Venmo account, all your transaction they're just
out there. So she noticed this and she found the
site that you can use to just see all the
incoming transactions. They are going through memo one time, and
she cataloged them all. She all the of all the
transactions in seen. She took a note of over two millions.
She pointing out the fact that you can notice interesting
(09:14):
patterns when you kind of look at all the transactions
at one I'm not always on the Venmo app, but
when I use it, I always take a little bit
of time to kind of scroll through what people are doing.
It's kind of one of my favorite things to do
because it's it's fun. You get to see what people
are paying each other for, and very much so with
noticing patterns or even to a smaller extent, just those
one time transactions that you see. I have my app
(09:36):
open right now. People that I don't know, you know,
they have their comments. So so one is an emoji
of a movie ticket, so they paid somebody back for
getting them their movie. A cell phone and the little
money flying emoji, you know, payment for my cell phone bill,
house payments, people put electric bill. You know. You can
tell all this stuff that people are paying each other for,
(09:57):
and you can use it to deduce path items about people,
learn more about people. But that's not it because there's
a lot of your public data that you don't know
you're giving away. Especially with Venmo. It links a lot
of times to your Facebook profile and things like that.
So I control around for a while and find out
a lot about you, and you will never know who
(10:17):
I am exactly. I think one thing is interesting is
that you know, to sign up for Venmo, one option
you have is to link your Facebook account, and the
Facebook account profile photo shows up in this public website
where you can just view all the transactions if you
have it linked. So if you can look at the
first name and last name, which are also available on
this public site, and then you can also look at
(10:37):
the Facebook profile photo, you can go to Facebook cross
reference the name with the photo, and then learn way
more about a person. Just from having those two pieces
of information. You can find out where they live more accurately,
the area they reside and maybe not the address, as
well as you know their interests, who else they're talking
to and hanging out with. The study is really interesting
to study actually noted some of the most interesting Venmo users,
(10:59):
which they call the human of Venmo. She noticed the
drug dealers and one person they called the yellowest Yellow
as you know, you only live once, and they were
just eating and drinking so much soda and pizza, and
to the point where it calls him the question enough
an insurance company sta all this, could it possibly give
you higher rates of life insurance if they knows how
(11:19):
poorly you're eating. You're giving that information out publicly, so
it's not like you can say later, well, I was
kidding or something like that. It's like, no, well, you
know you saw all of your transactions. Basically, that's a
huge plant. I think the fact that you know this
data becomes public. Once that gets out there, you can't
put that genie back in the bottle. There was a
Wall Street Journal article also recently made that takes into
(11:41):
account some of this stuff. It says, if you make
a mistake in payment to somebody, also good luck getting
that back. It's the simplest typing one letter off on
a person's name and then boom, you sent it to
the wrong person. And they talk about this person who
got a mistake in payment from somebody, and then decided
to go and investigate a little bit, and they found
out that the person sent them a payment mistakenly. They
(12:03):
researched them like as you said, you know it links
back to a Facebook. You can find out more details
from them. They had made payment to another person for
a quote unquote lesbian game. Later on they were kind
of embarrassed about and they were trying to demand the
money back, and you just got to be very careful
with all this stuff. Luckily, Vemo put some measures in
place so that there's at least a little bit of
friction when you're paying some money to a new user
(12:24):
who's not part of your contact list, And luckily for them,
they're able to get the money back if the recipient
did not already cash out. And when you're using these apps,
you have to take the utmost care, especially when I
have to do with your money. It's a simple fix.
The author of the study public by default. They used
then most publicly available information to track all the transactions
(12:46):
of all these users. What do we do to protect ourselves?
One thing that users can do to protect themselves is
very easy. To go into your Vemo app, hit the
little hamburger menu on the top left, and then you
go to settings at the bottom under the privacy section,
hitting that privacy button. You see you know, public friends, private,
private friends. Take it off a public Do not let
(13:07):
the Internet see your transactions because who knows what that
data could be used for down the road, right or
what creeps are just trying to look who you're paying
and what you're paying for. And keep to yourself exactly.
Xavier Harding, reporter for Mike, thank you very much for
joining us, figure of spur at Risk. I would recommend
(13:29):
to anybody to be very careful when they're posting, because
even if they aren't defaming the doctor or the hospital,
they are still putting themselves at risk of being sued.
Joining us now is Jane O'Donnell. She covers healthcare policy
for USA Today. With the rise of social media, you
can go onto sites like Yelp and get reviews for
(13:50):
just about anything. In this case, people are reviewing their
doctors and hospitals, and doctors are fighting back on patients
who are posting negative comments. There's a bunch of sites
rate m D health grades. You can use Google reviews, Yelp,
as I said, and people can post whatever they want. Basically,
tell us a little bit about doctors fighting back against
(14:11):
these negative comments. Right, Perhaps understandablieve, particularly if you have
anyone in the medical field in your family. You can
imagine that that it must make them quite unhappy if
they have a particularly disgruntled patient who is spending a
lot of time what they consider harassing. What the patient
might think is only fair because they've had such a
bad experience. So you can understand why the doctor or
(14:33):
the hospital might be unhappy with this. But think about
it from the other perspective, or both perspectives. In fact,
the patient who's been injured or got just very bad service. Yeah,
there's not a lot of places you can really go
to express your displeasure other than social media. I mean,
you go to all those places because it's easy. It's
easy to write a review, and it's easy to say, hey,
if I went in for this and and they gave
(14:55):
me subpar treatment. But as you said, you know a
lot of times these doctors in hospitals will fight back.
They'll sue you, or they'll try to get your comments removed.
Tell us about a few cases of doctors fighting back. Right,
These doctors and hospitals have far deeper pockets than most
of us, so when they want to come after patients,
they can really fight it out in court, and they
(15:17):
can afford the best lawyers their hospitals have a vested
interest in helping their doctors, so they're going after people
like retired Air Force Colonel David Antune. I became familiar
with David Antune last year. He had prostate cancer and
he had prostate cancer surgery. As many people know, one
of the side effects is in continence and impotence. He
(15:41):
alleges that the risks of that were very small and
that his doctor stated that he had more experience than
David said that his research shows that he did. And
he has also started posting documents that he says showed
that the doctor wasn't in the operating room during the
(16:01):
time of his surgery. He was. He was very injured
in addition to becoming incontinent and impotent. Um So this
dragged on in court for for almost ten years. He
has been in litigation with the Cleveland clinic and now
the doctor since then because he was a relentless poster
on social media, so they actually had him arrested. Criminal
(16:23):
charges were filed against him for first he was there
was a civil stalking protective order and then they said
that he violated that by posting on Yelp. He settled
last week. I was out in Cleveland, and they settled
what started as a couple of felonies and a misdemeanor,
facing up to a year in prison. They settled for
a hundred dollars in a minor misdemeanor. This is a
(16:44):
guy who never had one speeding ticket in his life.
And some of these other patients that we talked about.
Other cases involved a couple of different women who had
posted things about being unhappy with their nose jobs. In
both cases it were was nose jobs. And these doctors
are going after them, very wealthy plastic surgeons, because they
say it's it's done tremendous damage to their businesses. And
(17:06):
then there's a hospital in Michigan where they sued the
and this is a Facebook issue where two daughters and
a granddaughter of an elderly woman they say we're mistreated,
are being sued for what they posted on Facebook about
the hospital's treatment. What did legal experts say on how
to protect yourself? I mean, you have if you're posting something.
Opinions are okay, but you have to be factually correct
(17:26):
when you're stating something about the service that you've got. Yes,
so you're at risk. I would recommend to anybody to
be very careful when they're posting, because even if they
aren't defaming the doctor or the hospital, they are still
putting themselves at risk of being sued. And the doctors
and hospitals usually can't sue websites like Yelp and whatnot
(17:48):
because they're not liable for the postings of the users
all the time. So they're going to come after you.
They're going to come after the individual patients. Yeah, and
then they'll go after the site and say what them
that one of these posts has violated the site's terms,
which can be pretty friendly. And keep in mind that
a lot of these sites are they're depending on these
(18:09):
hospitals and doctors for advertising dollars, so you can imagine
who some of them might diede with in a dispute.
I WI should a patient go if they have a complaint, though,
I mean, like I said, a lot of times, somebody's
going to default to some of the social media or
a Yelp or something. Put that negative review out there,
said I was very unhappy. But where should they be
going first to express their displeasure. There's somebody who's been
(18:30):
a consumer reporter off and on for most of my career.
The most important thing right away is to talk to
the doctor, unless if you truly don't trust this person.
You know, if something is truly botched, you might want
to go above them to the hospital or to a
different doctor within the hospital, but you want to start
and see if they'll fix it for you. It's very
difficult to get an attorney to take a medical malpractice case,
(18:53):
but if you think you have a very strong case,
it's worth contacting one. Well. The recommendations always hold true.
Be careful what you post us on social media and
review sites, because they could always come back at you.
Jane O'Donnell, covering healthcare policy for USA Today, Thank you
very much for joining us. Sure my pleasure. All right,
that's it for today. Join us on social media at
(19:15):
Daily Dive pod on Twitter and Daily Dive Podcast on Facebook.
We love the feedback, so don't forget to leave us
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Dive and I Heart Radio or subscribe wherever you get
your podcasts. The Daily Dive is produced by Miranda Mirando
and engineered by Tony Sarrantino. I'm Oscar and Mirrors in
Los Angeles, and this was your daily dive
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