Venmo: Exposing a user's lifestyle

The focus of this work is to investigate the implications of the intersection of payment processing and social networking. Venmo is a peer-to-peer mobile payment service with a social twist. We analyze the information that is publicly available on Venmo. This allows us to see patterns of a user's day to day life, who they interact with, and what they spend money on. In this paper, we modify an existing Chrome extension, Money Trail, by adding a map reduce method to track common messages that are used in a user's transaction. Analyzing the occurrence of common words exposes a user's personal activities and budget habits.