Forget Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat. The best place to stalk your children is Venmo, Bloomberg reports.
The app, which enables users to shift money from their accounts to those of others, is unique in its real-time feed of transactions, with room for comments limited to a few words. And because Venmo automatically sets payments to public, linked people can read everything from their group.
Nowhere is the gulf between young and older more obvious—and more readable.
Some parents have trouble interpreting the brief, ambiguous Venmo posts, such as 54-year-old John Metcalf, who couldn’t make sense of the “dick order” post his daughter Jeana’s friend used to describe a payment Jeana made. Jeana, 20, says the post was “totally random.”
Though the app is mostly used to split the cost of a pizza (a transaction with a pizza emoji occurs every 20 seconds), many young people have also been able to predict the blossoming of relationships, exes reuniting and couples’ breakups simply by tracking their Venmo feeds.
“There’s not rock-hard evidence,” 24-year-old Avery Taylor told Bloomberg. “Venmo isn’t the greatest place for cold, hard facts. But it’s good for leads because you can kind of gauge what’s going on.”
Owned by PayPal Holdings, Inc., Venmo said it processed more than $40 billion of payments in the last 12 months and grew 50% in the first quarter.
