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Comment by jonknee | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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...

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 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.

> 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.

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