Neobank Bunq Shares Customers’ Investments to Their Contacts Without Permission

Bunq, a Dutch neobank that’s been growing in popularity in recent years, has started sharing users’ investments with others on their contacts list, according to RTL.

Sebastiaan den Boer, a user of the Bunq app, noticed that they were able to see purchases of stocks from people on your phone’s contact list while they were trying to buy some stock of their own.

Supposedly the feature is just to allow you to see activity from your friends, but as Sebastiaan points out, you don’t only have your friends in your contacts list. You probably have people you haven’t spoken to in years that could end up seeing all your stock trading activity if you give the app access to your contacts.

Bunq says that they have had the feature for over a year and this is the first complaint they’ve had.

The app asks for several permissions when you launch it, including access to your contacts list. Sebastiaan says it’s not clear at all that the permission is used for this purpose.

A year ago, Bunq caught some flak for contacting customers who were critical of the app. One customer claimed they were contacted by Bunq after making a Reddit post critical of the bank, with a threat to terminate their relationship.

Another customer claimed they were contacted after having made edits on Bunq’s Wikipedia page.

Debanking has been a hot topic in recent years. With most people’s money and assets tied up in banks that they don’t control, your bank can suddenly close your account without warning, such as what happened in 2021 with a sex worker in Australia.

We saw censorship from payment processors as well earlier this year, with Steam fighting Visa and Mastercard and payment processors over payment for legal content. There are so many institutions involved in a simple financial transaction, any of which could arbitrarily decide to deny the transaction.

Financial institutions leveraging their power over peoples’ finances leads to censorship and discrimination, and possible silencing of those that speak out against them, leads to the same censorship and chilling effect that authoritarian governments make use of.

Bunq is looking to expand into the US and has gotten past phase one with its broker-dealer license getting approved. It’s time we demanded privacy and fairness from our financial institutions, no one should have to worry about their financial life being ruined from completely legal actions. We all deserve privacy and security in our banks.