I figure whatever they are trying to achieve probably doesn’t work. Otherwise Cash App would do it. But important decision makers are in too deep to admit they were wrong. Smells of turning the Magic Mouse upside down to charge it.
It is definitely odd. I think it started off as a KYC-kind of check. If there’s some weird, possibly illegal reason you type into the “what is this payment for?” input, I read that someone on behalf of Venmo will contact you to have you explain it further and to investigate if it should lead to the closure of your account.
It is unsurprising that Venmo has a log of transactions, right? That’s a necessary part of the job. Having it as something that can be presented as a social feed is the weird thing…
It almost seems like a radical art project, philosophical statement, or social experiment around transparency. Like, hypothetically in some alternate universe if they did no KYC, and just published everybody’s transactions, your peers could inspect your transactions, the police could just look and see if you were transacting with criminals… sort of like open source transactions. Maybe that was the original idea? And then eventually they got some actual customers and said “shit we’re a real company now, let’s put the social experiment on the back burner, add an opt-out, and start doing in-house kyc.”
I had no idea this was true until a buddy of mine who I play hockey with started putting super offensive notes on the payment, trying to trigger someone since it was a hot debate after one of our games if this actually occurred. After about five or six of these, someone did in fact contact him first via email, then actually called him and asked him to explain the notes and yes they do monitor these and yes, if its really suspect, the feds will be notified.
Which then begs the obvious - if you're buying drugs, then don't put you're buying drugs or paying off your bookie.
I guess it's law enforcement on the honor system - when you do something illegal, you're expected tell the police-monitored feed that you did it. We assume that no one is so unethical that they keep their illegal acts secret.
For extra credit, let's put this stuff on the blockchain. Crime is solved!
Engagement. It's part of a dark pattern that triggers that little neuron tie our tendency to compare ourselves to others, a sort of "keeping up with the Joneses" type thing. It is also billed as a free advertising for businesses (e.g. hey, look where your friends shop!) which encourages more businesses to accept Venmo as a payment method.
Anything for the sake of growth or perceived growth, up to and including privacy violations.
If i put your information in a feed, you'll look really stupid when you cry privacy violation down the road as you realize what I've been doing with your information.
