The Venmo App’s New Design Includes Important Privacy Improvements.
For me, Venmo has always been an app for quickly paying off debt. Someone pays for dinner with their card, and I transfer my share through Venmo; I pay for travel expenses, and the group transfers money back through Venmo. But Venmo has always felt like so much more. The app feels like a hybrid of banking, social networking, and cryptocurrency buying and selling. None of that changes with the new design; in fact, it seems to emphasize multi-functionality more than ever. But it does introduce significant changes to its privacy policy, at least for new users, that probably should have been made from the start.
How Venmo will change in the coming weeks
Venmo is launching a redesigned app in the coming weeks , and the changes are quite significant: the redesigned user interface definitely looks like an app released in 2026, with large, rounded blocks, bold titles and text, and updated imagery. Over time, the company also plans to add new sections to the app, which it calls “surfaces.” These include “Send,” which contains Venmo’s usual features, such as exchanging funds and scheduling payments; “Money,” which lets you buy and sell cryptocurrency and link your account to other services; and “Rewards,” which houses the Venmo cashback program and various offers.
If you’re already a Venmo user, you’ll certainly notice these changes right away. But perhaps the most significant change will only affect new Venmo users—and mind you, in a good way. Going forward, users signing up for new Venmo accounts will have their transactions set to private by default. They can, of course, change this setting, but if they don’t, all payments made through Venmo will be hidden from their friends and contacts, and not appear in their main feed.
This is a pretty radical change for Venmo. Throughout Venmo’s history, new user profiles were initially public. Unless you intervened, your transactions were broadcast to everyone who followed you or anyone you paid. This is fine if you’re a Venmo user looking for extra engagement, or perhaps you’re a nosy user who wants to see who’s paying whom and for what. But most of us probably don’t need the Venmo world to know about our financial affairs, even if we have nothing “to hide.” So this change is for the better.
Of course, Venmo doesn’t force you to display your transactions publicly. You can change this setting at any time and make all your transactions private by default. You can also set privacy for individual payments if you want to hide certain transactions from public view. However, many (if not most) users won’t intentionally change the default settings after creating their accounts. Therefore, I’m willing to bet that a significant portion of the transactions visible on Venmo come from people who don’t want to share this information. This wouldn’t be a problem if Venmo had set its accounts to private from the start.
How to make your Venmo account private
If you’re new to Venmo, your privacy settings are already set. However, if your account has been around for a while, your settings may be public if you haven’t changed them. Luckily, if you want to make your account private, it’s easy: open the app, then go to your profile. Tap the gear icon in the upper right corner, then select “Privacy.” Here, make sure “Private” is checked. If you’re happy with only friends being able to see it, you can select “Friends.” But to hide it completely, tap “Private.” You can also set individual payments to “Private” if you don’t want to hide all your payments. Once you reach the payment screen, tap “Public” in the same row as “Privacy,” then choose “Private” or “Friends.”
Now your transactions will still appear in the feed, but they will be visible only to you and the other party involved. This can be identified by the small lock icon that appears on the payment.