Students at Columbia University are fretting over the arrest of a fellow undergraduate accused of dealing drugs on campus. The alleged dealer was an active user of Venmo, a mobile app for sending money to people, and on Venmo, transactions are public by default.
Yes, even drug transactions.
Much of his activity has since been removed or made private. But as of April 3, his public Venmo profile contained 273 transactions, all of them accompanied by brief messages from the payer. They range from random to cryptic to—at least in hindsight—pretty obvious.
The drug charges haven’t been proven, but the Venmo messages offer a fascinating case study of how a certain demographic of young Americans thinks about what they share particularly sensitive information on the internet (if they are thinking much about it at all). What follows is a sample of the messages, with names removed.
