My Ex Bought a Couch: Venmo as Social Media

Illustration by Briaanna Chiu

Not all social media are created equally. If you need the latest assessment, Snapchat is exactly what it's always been, Facebook is generally a family-friendly highlight reel, and Instagram is a mess of all sorts of photo albums. Venmo? A day-to-day log of who you interact with the most. Who you get pizza with, who you live with, and even who you work for.

Owned by Paypal, Venmo is a mobile payment service essentially designed to fill the modern need to split the bill in an increasingly cashless world. Venmo allows you to save contacts, calling these regular connections ‘Friends.’ If your transactions are public, which they are set to as default, your ‘friends’ can see all of the exchanges you make and with whom- even if your ‘friends’ aren’t theirs. There are two tabs for users to browse the activity of others: the world tab (indicated by an icon of the planet) and the friend tab (indicated by a pair of silhouetted heads). In the world tab, users can see transactions made by complete strangers- including their full names and profile pictures. Despite the glaring privacy issue here, it’s commonplace for users to set their real name as their username for clarity and ease of connection with their peers.

I hadn’t used Venmo in probably over a year when I had to re-download it to pay a friend for groceries and gas after a camping trip when I was visiting home in Minnesota. I currently live in Canada, where we use bank to bank transfer, making for direct, secure, and private transactions. I can’t see who else is going to that concert, or who all went on a surf trip to Tofino together. Social media is naturally voyeuristic, but ultimately none of those things are my business, let alone my business to discover on an app meant for monetary exchange.

It turns out, however, the social media aspect of Venmo is deliberate. In a 2018 article¹ written for tech blog CNET, staff reporter Marian Shou reported that Venmo itself admits that the decision to make transaction history public as default was deliberate: “We make it default because it’s fun to share [information] with friends in the social world.” It makes the app engaging, providing a service beyond mobile payment. This adds some intrigue to the app and keeps you lingering long after completing a transaction.

Further encouraging social engagement, Venmo suggests potential ‘friends’ based on your phone contacts and Facebook friends list, if you grant the app access. In my case, this happened to include blocked contacts. My guess is this happened because my Venmo account existed long before I made those blockages. Either way- jarring! It’s uncomfortable enough to see the exchanges of fallen out friends you’ve since somewhat made amends with, but to be recommended a bad ex, or even an abuser, is another thing. The ability to just search someone up by name and see the details of their everyday exchanges is not a normal thing humans were ever supposed to be able to do. Venmo offers access to a level of personal detail that they probably shouldn’t. If you thought oversharing on your private close friend's story on Instagram was intimate, wait until you can easily find out your ex-best friend’s dog has worms, someone you used to love bought a couch, and your friend's abuser is now a tattoo artist, all because you wanted to send someone gas money.

In regards to being able to see the feed of absolute strangers (or at least people who aren’t your ‘friends’), the glaring privacy issues of the global feed are being taken more seriously. In July of 2021, Venmo announced that they would be removing the global feed- meaning users can only see the activity of their ‘friends’: “Venmo has struggled over the years to balance its desire to add a social element to its peer-to-peer payments-based network, with the need to offer users their privacy,” Sarah Perez wrote² for TechCrunch. As of August 29th, making for a very long rollout of these updates, I still have the world feed. I can still search people up and see their public feeds. Even when it finally does disappear from everyone's feed, this action doesn’t change much in terms of stalking people you know, which is arguably the most interesting part of the app anyway. The friends tab is here to stay, keeping Venmo a social media.

When I finally opened Venmo, I immediately got a contact recommendation for a really bad ex. Thankfully Venmo offers the ability to block users, but that didn’t keep me from snooping first- and I’m not the only person who has ever made this deranged decision! In a 2014 article for The Atlantic called ‘Why the Venmo Newsfeed Is The Best Social Network Nobody’s Talking About,³’ staff writer Eric Levinson admits to the creepy but human desire to observe other people’s lives. “It really does say so much about people’s lives… I love all of it. I’m so nosy. It lets me be so nosy,” says one Venmo user he interviewed. Levinson himself writes “due to its incredibly intimate look at how your friends spend their money, the Venmo newsfeed has become one of the most interesting, informative social networks out there.” Whether you are among the many closeted nosy Venmo users or not, this assessment of the app is spot on. No other social media captures such mundane yet highly personal details of our lives, recorded and presented minute-by-minute.

It would be dishonest of me to say that I downloaded Venmo, paid my friend, and simply deleted it again. I can’t say that I didn’t scroll through the friend feed, seeing the day-to-day activity of people I haven’t talked to in 4+ years, feeling nostalgic and yucky and weird. It’s human to be nosy, to want to know what's going on in other people's lives. But for my own sake, and for yours, I advise that we all do our best to keep such intimate aspects of our lives private, and avoid peeking at the accounts of those who don’t.

References

¹ Venmo explains why transactions are public by default: 'Because it's fun' 

² Venmo removes its global, public feed as part of a major redesign 

³ Why the Venmo Newsfeed Is the Best Social Network Nobody's Talking About