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Comment by quadrangle | Hacker News Reader

Is there reason to suspect Venmo, Dwolla, and their ilk of becoming privacy-invading ad-focused systems (if they aren't already)? I.e. I worry the trend is about tracking and ads, and that's the mechanism for eliminating fees vs the more respectable approach of having a few specialty services that cost something (the Craigslist model effectively).

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I actually can't say I really mind the "privacy-invading" here because financial systems are already about the most heavily resold data there is, with the people who are currently charging you the fees (your bank and credit card) making billions off it.

If somebody can take the same data, package it up more nicely, and make the economics work to eliminate fees, I actually don't think we're worse off?

I think if Venmo and Dwolla track all your purchases and did things like share your purchase history with third-party advertisers who might use it elsewhere, that's a real concern. I haven't inspected their privacy policies but am more concerned about their future privacy policies.

If it were as benign as them showing some ads themselves but not sharing any data with anyone else, I agree that it would be worth the trade-off, but it would still be a compromise we'd want to reference in all conversations about this. I haven't seen any reference to these issues at all yet, so I'm just speculating and being cynical.

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