| | |
|
NishaChandraFirstEssay 3 - 15 Jan 2020 - Main.NishaChandra
|
| |
| META TOPICPARENT | name="FirstEssay" |
|---|
| | | What makes Venmo different than the other mobile wallet applications, like the Square Cash App or Zelle, is the social aspect. Venmo purposely has made banking open and social as a way to encourage users to utilize the application. Users can add other users as “friends”, either manually or by importing a friends list from their contact list or Facebook friends list. This is a purely social feature – you don’t have to be friends with someone to pay or request payment from them. | |
<
< | The efficiency argument
So why use Venmo if it demands to
much data and shares so much with the world? Probably because it makes life easier. There are no more worries about who’ll pick up the tab.
First, that's not a property of the social aspect of Venmo: any mobile payment system does that. Second, so does cash: we were perfectly capable of splitting a check in the 20th century, too. More thought about why is indicated. Perhaps doing arithmetic and being responsible for one's cash are anxieties that the machine can take on for you, in return for being allowed to spy on, and disclose for its own benefit, your spending details?
Gone are the days where you’d have to carry around cash or checks in order to pay people back. Payment is instantaneous, so there’s no lingering debts hanging over your head.
Actually, that's how cash works.
And it allows people to be proactive and charge others for the money they’re owed, instead of awkwardly waiting for the other person to remember.
We used to ask people to pay up when we split a check. It almost always worked. What data do we have to show that it worked less well than sending payment requests through e-systems?
But this so-called efficiency may not be worth the immense privacy violations. | >
> | The anxieties argument
So why use Venmo, or even another mobile payment system when cash is just as efficient? The answer might be that we have anxieties around the use of cash. Cash can involve fumbling at the register, doing mental math, and having awkward conversations with people to settle a bill. With a mobile system, we can conveniently surrender those anxieties to the machine in exchange for our data. Additionally, users may be using Venmo over non-social mobile payment systems because Venmo was the first popular system. Inertia and the anxieties tied to signing up with a whole new system have stopped users from abandoning Venmo for more private pastures. But this release of anxieties may not be worth the immense privacy violations. | | | The Privacy Concerns | | | Data harvesting
Venmo and others can use transaction history as a way to mine information, similarly to how Google mines users’ information based on their searches. Venmo has a function to track users’ locations, and also has near infinite data on what those users eat, how they spend their time, and even who they live with. Even individuals can harvest this data because so much of it is publicly available. For instance, in June 2018, a programmer scraped public Venmo data and was able to compile a list of users who were likely selling drugs and receiving payments through Venmo. | |
<
< | Under its privacy policy, Venmo can share the data it gathers with its parent company PayPal? , its affiliates and subsidiaries, any companies PayPal? plans to merge with or be acquired by, law enforcement, government officials, and third-party service providers. All these entities are surely currently using the data compiled by Venmo for their own purposes – whether it be for targeted marketing or catching law-breaking behavior. | >
> | Under its privacy policy, Venmo can share the data it gathers with its parent company PayPal? , its affiliates and subsidiaries, any companies PayPal? plans to merge with or be acquired by, law enforcement, government officials, and third-party service providers. All these entities are surely currently using the data compiled by Venmo for their own purposes – whether it be for targeted marketing or catching law-breaking behavior. | | |
Psychological Effects
Our society seems to have accepted the massive breaches of privacy that accompany use of the internet today. We’ve adapted to it and internalized it as something that will always affect our external lives. But the social aspects of Venmo’s style of banking can have negative effects on our internal lives as well. In return for the services Venmo provides, users open themselves up to judge and be judged by friends and strangers alike. Social media facilitates comparison to others, along with all the self-doubt, anxiety, and shame that goes along with that comparison. No good can come out of seeing your ex-boyfriend’s back-and-forth payments with another girl. No good can come out of obsessively checking your girlfriend’s transactions to find evidence she’s cheating. And no good can come out of seeing your peers’ living seemingly rich and vibrant social lives while you sit at home alone. The toll social media can take on one’s mental health is surely not worth paying a bill slightly faster. | |
<
< |
Let alone not paying a bill slightly faster.
This is a good first draft because it brings out the issues. The
analysis needs strengthening in the next draft. I've suggested two
overarching directions of attention in the interlinear comments.
| | |
You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable. |
|
|
|
|
This site is powered by the TWiki collaboration platform.
All material on this collaboration platform is the property of the contributing authors.
All material marked as authored by Eben Moglen is available under the license terms CC-BY-SA version 4.
|
|
| | |