How to receive XMR privately

Why receive-side matters

Sender privacy on Monero is provided by the protocol: ring signatures, stealth addresses, confidential amounts. Receive-side privacy is provided by your wallet hygiene. If you hand the same primary address to your employer, a marketplace, and a friend, all three know about each other's payments to you (via a service-side ledger), and any future shared address derivation is correlatable.

Use a new subaddress per payee

One subaddress per relationship. Wallet → "New subaddress" → label it ("ACME payroll", "OTC desk", "Mom"). Hand each party a distinct one.
Never reuse a subaddress that's been shared publicly (forum post, donation page) for a private payment. Treat public-facing addresses as one-way mailboxes.
Subaddresses cost nothing to generate. Generate as many as you want. They all sweep into the same wallet balance.

View-keys: handle with care

Private view key = ability to see all incoming transactions for a wallet (but not spend). Useful for accountants / auditors / disclosing to a counterparty. Once disclosed, you can't take it back.
Public view-key proofs let you prove a specific tx exists without revealing the whole wallet — use get_tx_proof for one-off receipts (refunds, customer-support disputes).
Don't paste the view key into a block-explorer field on the clearnet — the explorer operator now has it. Use a self-hosted node or a privacy-respecting explorer.

Integrated addresses (legacy, mostly obsolete)

Pre-subaddress workflow used "integrated addresses" — primary address + payment ID baked into one string. Exchanges still hand these to you on deposit. They work, but subaddresses are strictly better for everything else: each subaddress is its own stealth address, doesn't require the sender to do anything special, and doesn't leak the payment ID format on chain.

Receive-side checklist

Use a wallet that supports subaddresses (every modern wallet — see wallet picker).
Generate a fresh subaddress per counterparty. Label it.
Sync your wallet against a remote node over Tor, or your own node — public clearnet nodes can correlate your IP with the subaddresses they serve scans for. (Tor setup →)
For public donation addresses, rotate annually. Old one stays valid; new payments go to the fresh address. Limits how much historical context any one party builds about you.
Never publish your primary address (the one ending in unique suffix) — always a subaddress.

Mobile wallets — extra caveats

Mobile wallets default to remote nodes for speed. Pick one that lets you set a Tor remote node (Cake, Monerujo).
Push-notification "incoming TX" features almost always run via a centralized server with your view key — disable unless you accept the trade.
Background sync over cellular leaks timing — consider syncing only on a known network.