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Comment by BookmarkSaver | Hacker News Reader

Guys, people aren't "exposing their finances" on Venmo. People don't use it to buy stuff, or pay off CC bills, or anything. Nor are the transaction amounts exposed.

It's used for balancing payments/debts between individuals. I don't consider "A paid B for brunch yesterday" or "X paid Y for Rent+cable" in any way to be "exposing finances". It's just another random (albeit unnecessary) social network, one that takes literally no effort to use or disable.

Shocking, young people don't care if others know that they went out to dinner with some friends. It's amazing to me that this level of exposure seems "nuts" to you all and leaves you "speechless". Like, how paranoid and antisocial are you all? Who cares about this stuff? Or is this all just some crazy slippery-slope thing going on in your heads?

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> Shocking, young people don't care if others know that they went out to dinner with some friends

But, it seems like they do care. They want others to know they went for dinner with friends, or settled a bill for brunch. It seems like they're obsessed with finding ways to extract the most social presence from normal everyday activities.

It's enabled by default. It isn't an "obsession", it was something the company threw in there and that users don't care enough about to disable. I'm sure usage of it would vanish almost instantly if something like the actual $ amount was published in addition to the message.

Thank you... also I'm not sure people realize that you type the description of the transaction, it's not coming from a credit card or something, so you can be as specific/vague/nonsensical/misleading as you want...

It's amazing to me that this level of exposure seems "nuts" to you all and leaves you "speechless".

I'm old. I'm very painfully aware that other people often feel amazingly entitled to have some say in how I spend my life. I have spent a lot of decades arranging a life in which, no, not too many people have any say whatsoever.

It's possible that the youth of today are experiencing an unprecedented amount of (social) freedom that their cranky elders lack. If so, good for you.

It's also possible that you just haven't yet figured out that information is power, hell is other people and there are lots of crazies in the world who feel incredibly entitled to try to enforce some standard of behavior on you that you won't notice until you try to do something they don't like for some reason, no matter how innocuous.

What experience do you "cranky elders" have that makes this seem dangerous? What possible malicious intent can be applied to the knowledge that someone shares rent with their roommate, or the occasional bar tab settlement? There aren't even dollar amounts attached, and usually just cryptic emoji messages.

Just saying "Information is power" makes it sound like there's been no thought put into the objection at all, I've not seen a single concrete explanation as to how this level of data collection is or could be dangerous. It seems like cowardly hiding behind a blanket principle because of paranoia about anything that can possibly be related to "privacy".

>I'm very painfully aware that other people often feel amazingly entitled to have some say in how I spend my life. I have spent a lot of decades arranging a life in which, no, not too many people have any say whatsoever.

I have absolutely no clue how this has anything to do with Venmo whatsoever.

These comments are crazy to me. There is legit nothing of value on the Venmo social feed. Just people giving roommates money for rent/cable/bills or friends settling up small debts with emojis that don’t mean anything anyways. No one my age (mid 20s) Ives a shit about who knows that stuff

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