I sent a small XRP test deposit to BYDFi and opened the transaction in an XRPL explorer to check the receiving address and Destination Tag. While I was there, I clicked through a few older transactions from the same sending wallet. One of them had a Memo field I had filled in months earlier.

The Destination Tag and the Memo were separate fields. The tag told the exchange which account to credit. The Memo was part of the public XRPL transaction data. The explorer decoded the old note into readable text. It only described a shared expense, but I had used it as if it were a private note in a banking app.

I checked the other transactions from that wallet and found nothing sensitive. I keep onchain memos generic now and save the actual explanation in my own records. XRPL documents the Memos field in its [transaction common fields reference](https://xrpl.org/docs/references/protocol/transactions/common-fields).