Venmo is now offering the Venmo Teen Account. This includes use of the Venmo app as well as a Venmo debit card (MasterCard).
Venmo promises that:
The Venmo Teen Account will allow parents to monitor transactions, manage privacy settings, send money to their teen, and will help parents to educate their teens on creating healthy money habits.
This may be a perfect opportunity to explain to young people how electronic money and spending can be monitored, tracked, and controlled by a higher authority. After all, it’s right in the quote above! Also included are “parental controls and visibility into their teen's spending habits."
Each Venmo Teen Account is connected to and managed by a parent's personal Venmo account and provides parents with essential parental controls and oversight of the activity on their Venmo Teen Account. The Venmo Teen Account privacy settings, including payments and friends lists, will be set to private by default, and parents will be able to view their teen's transactions and friends list. Only the parent can change the Venmo Teen Account's privacy settings.
AND
Parental controls include the ability to view the Venmo Teen Account's balance and transaction history, manage the Teen Debit Card's PIN, lock and unlock the debit card, review a Teen Account's friends list, and block users from interacting with the Teen Account.
This last statement is ironically followed by the heading: Empowering.
Can you imagine as an adult operating under similar conditions? That’s what we can expect under a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) regime.
Do you think that if your parents can control your access to money and use of money and with whom you can interact, that Venmo or the Federal Reserve couldn’t do the same? Do you think that maybe if your parents gave you cash instead of a “Venmo Teen Account” you would have greater freedom over your spending? In effect, more control over your life?
“Healthy money habits” should include the preservation of privacy, anonymity, and autonomy. The primary lesson should be how cash helps to do that.
And don’t forget, Venmo is owned by PayPal, which endeavors to control your speech.
Restricted Activities
In connection with your use of our websites, your PayPal account, the PayPal services, or in the course of your interactions with PayPal, other PayPal customers, or third parties, you must not:
* * *
Provide false, inaccurate or misleading information;
This policy is mirrored in the Venmo User Agreement.
Restricted Activities
In connection with your use of our websites, your Venmo account, the Venmo services, or in the course of your interactions with us, other customers, or third parties, you must not:
* * *
Provide false, inaccurate or misleading information;
Of course, what is “false, inaccurate or misleading” is determined solely by PayPal/Venmo, and you have effectively no recourse against any action they take. At one time, that included dinging you for $2,500 without notice, but that seems to have been removed from the current User Agreement. Please let me know if I missed it somewhere.
Barack Obama might call this a “teachable moment”.
This is an excellent example of how NO ONE should WANT a government to “TAKE CARE OF YOU”.
I can do that just fine, thanks.
Excellent find and article, Dan, keep them coming!