And Venmo isn’t just any centralized payments tool: It’s one of the worst out there from a privacy perspective. Venmo sets new users’ transactions and notes to display publicly, by default, as part of its broader, deeply misguided goal of being a kind of social network for payments.

“We make it [public by] default because it’s fun to share [information] with friends in the social world,” a Venmo representative told CNET in 2021. “People open up Venmo to see what their family and friends are up to.”