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Comment by CSEThrowaway | Hacker News Reader

I have been complaining about this, basically since Venmo came out. My friends would just say "oh, you just make your account private" like it was no big deal, but I was still flabbergasted. Was it supposed to be some kind of social networking aspect? It just boggles my mind that people would participate in such a product. My primary experience with it was as an undergraduate, where student groups would use it to send money for things like membership fees, outfits, etc. Most of these people were downloading the app for the first time, and I doubt they bothered managing their privacy settings.

The fact that this is now just getting attention kind of makes me want to hit my head on my desk. I'm glad it is though; this site is very well done and I hope Venmo and its users take note.

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My sibling and their friends use the Cash app, they find the social networking aspect of venmo appalling. I think when Venmo came out, there was nothing else as convenient, so we accepted the social networking aspect for the convenience.

Man, what a brilliant feature though, for Venmo. Provide users with Emoji autocomplete, get perfectly labeled transactions. If I try to pay my roommate for electricity, it asks me to use a series of emojis that represent "electricity bill." In this way, Venmo is getting users to remove the ambiguity in describing their transactions. Something like "electricity" could refer to say, a night club, but Venmo got me to accurately label it as a power bill.

I use the Cash app as well. And I can't really tell if your second paragraph is a joke or not!

I think it's brilliant the same way that an evil genius is brilliant. Still evil though. And yes, that is actually what Venmo does if you try to type in "electricity bill"

In mine it just gives me one option that is a money emoji with a “dollar dollar bill” caption.

Maybe they’ve updated it since I last used it, but I suspect that “dollar dollar bill” is still a subtle tag that indicates that the transaction was a “bill” payment.

I just checked and I still get four emoji: lightning bolt, plug, lightbulb, money with wings (those probably aren’t their proper names, I’m just guessing) with the text “electricbill”

The number of BS posts on Venmo and made up reasons for payments is quite staggering. It became more of a joke for most people I know. Most of them on my news feed are for "eggplant squirt" emoji or something similar.

Every single one of my venmo transactions is labeled with a single eggplant.

Back when cash app supported email I used it because I’d much rather send an email and cc cash with a subject of “send $x”. Completely avoid the bs social stuff that i don’t really want

What good does "perfectly labeled transactions" do for Venmo? What do a couple of emoji so they know you're paying for electricity do differently than the memo field on a check did decades ago?

Presumably your bank wasnt aggregating all your check's memos to sell to some other adtech firm. The more accurate whoever is aggregating your data is, the more that data is worth.

Also, no clue is venmo is actually doing that.

I guess my point is what adtech firm is going to be interested in a person who pays for electricity? Everyone does that. I pay for water too, but that's not going to help anyone sell me stuff.

> I guess my point is what adtech firm is going to be interested in a person who pays for electricity? Everyone does that. I pay for water too, but that's not going to help anyone sell me stuff.

If your electricity bill is big, they could bucket you into a group that's potentially interested in "energy efficient appliances."

On the other hand if you're paying your bills with Venmo you're not in the demographic that buys appliances... If this is actually a valuable thing the winner is Visa/Mastercard, not Venmo. Venmo thinks you had a slice of pizza at some point because of an emoji, but Visa knows what pizza slice you had, when you ate it, how many other people went there that day, etc etc.

I guess electric bill isn't a good example, but I can think of lots of other situations where you might reimburse someone else for a product or service that spends on programatic advertising: flights, hotels, concerts, and obviously, all sorts of food and beverages.

That being said, personally, I'm bearish on programatic advertising.

So I do know that they apparently use it for anti-money laundering purposes. I learned that once when writing a request to some friends along the lines of "food from south of North Korea", causing them to flag my friends' payments to me because mentioning the string "North Korea" must have meant that I was secretly laundering money that way. Stupidly, Venmo required that my friends explain their transactions, not me, the requester.

So the lesson is, you can put jokes into your Venmo payments, but not jokes that imply that you're blatantly laundering money.

> So the lesson is, you can put jokes into your Venmo payments, but not jokes that imply that you're blatantly laundering money.

The implication being that either Venmo investigates you for labeling your transaction that, or you're able to violate NK sanctions by using Venmo and just saying it's for something else...

> In this way, Venmo is getting users to remove the ambiguity in describing their transactions.

really? i'm pretty sure there are a predefined set of phrases that map directly to emojis. when they already recognize these phrases, replacing them with an emoji removes no ambiguity for venmo.

What pissed me off is the "opt-out" approach to public transactions Venmo takes. As a first time user, it's fairly easy to not see the transaction is going to be public (and the privacy button is small and tucked away in a corner).

Venmo just makes me paranoid about transactions. I want to make sure I am paying the right person (hard to tell sometimes when searching for a friend). I also don't want other people to see my transaction AMOUNT most importantly (seems like an easy way for a criminal/fraudster to target people with lots of money). Further, once you hit send, there is basically no recourse in stopping the transaction (which is why scammers use Venmo, since Venmo support basically says "your problem, not mine").

Other people may have different experiences and perfectly enjoy the app, but this steered me clear of it.

You can't see the amount on any feed except the me tab

I just created a Venmo account today, since I'm going to a class that requires payment via Venmo or cash, and I have no cash. They had a few screens at initial sign in that went over public vs private, and let you set it right there, although they advised leaving everything public. So at least they are making it easy to change for a first time user now that this news has come out.

Teenagers/college students use it to show off they are hanging out with each other without looking like they're trying. That probably increased its adoption by young people.

This is why I use Apple Pay, with Apple, I can safely assume privacy is protected. With many other companies, especially PayPal ones, privacy is an inconvenience to their business model.

Yeah and to top things off they don't appear to store transaction history longer than 90 days so If you need to reach back (like me having to prove I paid my rent) then it becomes a huge hassle, if even possible...

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