Test that a private payment is private

Failure modes in this flow

Privacy can only be tested from the outside, by checking that the people who should not see something genuinely cannot.

• The payment succeeds - with its amount, note and privacy setting all confirmed.
• The sender can see it - because a private payment still has to be visible to the person who made it.
• The public cannot - the entry is absent from the public view.
• A friend cannot either - which is the distinction between private and friends-only.

Checking the friend viewer is what makes this test worth having. Private and friends-only are adjacent settings and a bug that downgrades one to the other passes any test that only checks the public feed.

Writing the objective

The privacy option is chosen explicitly rather than relying on an account default, because the default is exactly what a privacy regression would change.

---
mode: testing
url: https://my-testing-repo-main.vercel.app/venmo-clone-app/pay?reset=true
max_steps: 45
tags: [venmo, fintech, p2p]
---

# Venmoo 22.1: Pay with a note

Catalog objective: pay a friend with a note and verify the feed entry privacy.
Key assertion: the payment is visible only according to its privacy setting.

## Send a private payment
Select "Tom Alvarez" in "To", type "40" into "Amount", type "Rent split" into "What's it for?", choose the "Private" privacy option, and click "Pay".

## Verify the payment went through with its note and privacy
Verify a green banner titled "Payment sent" says you paid "Tom Alvarez" "$40.00" for "Rent split" with a privacy of "Private".

## Verify you can see it yourself
Click "Yourself" in the feed viewer and note the visible count, then verify the "Rent split" entry is listed.

## Verify the privacy setting hides it from others
Click "The public" and verify the "Rent split" entry is not visible, then click "A friend" and verify it is still not visible - a Private payment is only visible to you.

The positive case comes before the two negative ones, which establishes that the entry exists at all before the test starts proving it is hidden.

The assertions in detail

One send and three separate viewpoints.

Proving the entry exists before proving it is hidden is what separates a working privacy control from a payment that simply failed to appear anywhere.

Running it locally

kane-cli testmd run tests/venmo/pay-with-note_test.md

Add the friends-only setting as its own file, since the correct behaviour there is visible to a friend and hidden from the public.

Privacy controls are worth checking on every release rather than on request. Kane CLI in a pipeline covers scheduling, and checking the UI before a pull request covers catching a default change early.