The argument this morning is over pocket money. Our seven-year-old thinks he should get a raise for watering the outdoor plants, a job he does several times a week. (But this is summer in Ireland. How much watering can they actually need?) His pocket money is €2, paid each Friday, but he is looking for €4.
When it comes to pocket money, some parenting experts encourage incentivised chores. Others push for a strong separation between payment and helping around the house, so that we don’t raise children who refuse to fold their underwear without compensation. These debates surface anxieties about how to parent, but also how to transact.
Today, apps exist to teach children financial literacy and to allow parents to transfer money directly to their offspring. In the UK, there’s Go Henry. In Ireland, there’s Revolut <18. Most contain similar functions. Along with the crucial transfer button (because today’s parents don’t routinely carry cash) and savings, most have a chore feature, such as Revolut <18′s Challenges, allowing parents to link chores to cash.
Most also have built-in controls, so parents can survey what their children are spending their money on, or embargo categories such as alcohol, pornography or skins in games platform Fortnite. Take Revolut <18 again. A child’s app is created and linked with their parents. “There’s nothing a child can do without oversight,” says a Revolut spokesperson.
These apps give young people the tools for future financial literacy. They give their parents a degree of oversight. But what is the pay-off for the companies providing them?
Early recruitment is, of course, significant. So is revenue from transaction and subscription fees. And some suggest that the endgame may be in gathering transactional data – what a purchase can tell you and how that inference can be monetised for advertising, logistics, risk or as training data for AI.
[ Banks’ instant payment app was doomed when Revolut became a verb in Ireland ]
Take PayPal’s Venmo, a popular payments app in the US. Venmo is a kind of Facebook of money where users are encouraged to label transactions with a “What’s it for?” message. Messages such as “I love you”, “Baby shower” and “Everybody eats, even Bonnie”.
In the past, when Venmo’s feed was public by default, curious observers used it to piece together elicit weed deals, love stories, acrimonious break-ups and mental health disorders, from money transfers alone. Companies use transactional data to advertise, where signposts to events such as marriages, babies and new homes are all big-ticket items. Others have used it to calculate insurance and credit. They might want to know if you’ve seen a counsellor or had an addiction.
But what kinds of financial data might payments apps be gathering about under-18s? Is there any commercial utility to data about chores and pocket money? It’s perhaps less likely that children’s finance apps are interested in whether your children are brushing their teeth and earning a gold star for doing so than in how money moves within the family.
According to Bjorn Nansen, professor of media studies at the University of Melbourne, “there is potential value in seeing the transactional relationships that children and parents enter into, and how contemporary families are rewarding children, whether that’s [payment] for doing chores, or whether it’s ad-hoc or regular payments.”
“When you start to aggregate that kind of data, it gives you insights into contemporary family money – transactional relationships – that are of value to these companies.” What’s more, as a customer ages, the app offers unique longitudinal data, the monied story of an intimate life as a financial individual grows and matures.
“Ultimately these platforms create the conditions for establishing, normalising and entrenching the lifelong tracking of children’s economic lives,” according to Nansen.
[ How to teach kids about money: Put them on the payroll, €2 shopping trips and other tips ]
I wonder what stories the transfers between my child and I would tell? Not the €2 every Friday, but the other, more emotive sums. Every time my child is admitted to hospital unexpectedly, which as a child with a chronic health condition is often, he gets to pick a present. Like paying children to tidy their rooms, this kind of fiscal bribery adds up to bad parenting – I’m trying to compensate for something that it strictly off the ledger. A cannula is worth €15. An admission overnight is roughly €50. (Recently as these visits have become less traumatic and more routine, I’ve wondered if they should be worth less, which, as thoughts go, has its own dark economy.)
When I go away for work overnight, that is also a present, rising in value in proportion to the time away (or is it guilt?). My money steps in between my child and I when I can’t find other ways to set things right. These transfers measure the compromises and failures, in love and parenting. As data goes, it doesn’t get much more intimate than that.
Our anxiety is directed towards what the platform sees, but parents are often the ones who are seeking the data. A friend tells me how, on downloading Revolut<18 for her children, the app was automatically linked to her phone. There’s a benign reassurance in seeing their movements as they hit the cornershop on the way home from school.
Media scholars call this oversight “caring surveillance”. Surveillance capitalism has highlighted how platforms use locative and personal data to survey users. But parents and partners are also using data in invasive ways. The issue becomes more stark as children become teenagers. Revolut<18 allows parents to monitor their children’s purchases. While it’s a useful safety feature, particularly for younger children, it also removes what some might argue is a natural autonomy from teenagers’ spending. I’m sure we can all think of a few transactions that we would prefer our parents never knew about. (I was about to list some of mine, but I’d still prefer my mother stayed ignorant.)
Rachel O’Dwyer is a writer and a lecturer in Digital Cultures in the National College of Art and Design, Dublin