‘She’d been sending herself payments from me’: Venmo users on discovering secrets on the app

theguardian.com:

O fficially, Venmo is an app for transferring money from one person to another. In the US, where most banks do not offer instant free money transfers, it was revolutionary for simple things like splitting the bill on dinner, or send their roommates half of the rent. But because the Venmo app has a “home feed”, an endless scroll that shows payments between users, it’s also a sneaky form of social media. You can see how your friends spend their money – and who they spend it with.

After looking through my account, I now know that my high school soccer coach gave his wife money to spend at Petco last night. A friend of a friend went out for pizza. An old co-worker paid her dad for HBOMax. A man I met once exclusively sends people payments for the horse emoji – I assume this is code for ketamine, the horse tranquilizer/party drug, but maybe he has a secret gambling habit.

Though users have the option to make their payments private, many forget to. When Daily Beast journalists snooped Matt Gaetz’s transactions, they discovered the Florida Representative had paid an accused sex trafficker through the app.

Even Joe Biden didn’t have his account switched to private. It took Buzzfeed reporters less than 10 minutes to find the president’s personal account, where he reportedly sends his grandchildren funds.

What does this mean for the rest of us? A study conducted by experts at the University of Southern California found that two in five Venmo users publicly reveal “sensitive information” on the app. Another researcher documented a year’s worth of public interactions in the lives of strangers on Venmo and found what Vice called “a soap opera”: breakups, drug deals, payments to sugar daddies. We’re all accidentally telling on ourselves.