Who viewed my profile, platform by platform

Which platforms tell you who viewed your profile?

Two of the eleven do.

LinkedIn shows a named list and sells the long version of it. TikTok shows one only when both people have switched the setting on. Facebook states in its own help centre that it does not track profile views at all, and the other eight document no such feature and publish no such field.

Three different questions, asked as one

“Who viewed my profile” is three questions wearing one coat, and separating them settles the argument.

Does the platform tell the owner? On LinkedIn yes, and it is a paid product. On TikTok only when both accounts have opted in. Everywhere else in the table above, no.

Does the platform record it anyway? Every web service keeps server logs, because that is how web software works. None of these publish them to the account holder, which is the same reason nobody else can read them either.

What does the platform announce? Following, messaging, screenshotting and opening a story are announced loudly on the platforms that have those things. Reading a public page is not one of them.

So a service offering you a list of who viewed your Instagram or Duolingo profile is selling data the platform never collected. There is nothing there to buy, whatever the sales page promises.

How does LinkedIn's profile-view list actually work?

It is real, it is partial, and it costs you the same visibility it gives you.

A basic account sees the three most recent viewers from the last 90 days. A Premium subscription opens the full list for up to 365 days, which is the honest description of what the subscription is for. Nothing is shown at all if the profile has had no views in 90 days.

The trade sits in the browsing settings. Viewing profiles in private mode makes you appear as “LinkedIn Member” rather than by name, and on a free account it removes your own viewer list in exchange. Semi-private mode shows your job title, company, school and industry without your name.

None of this reaches an address. LinkedIn's discovery by email is a member setting that can be set to Nobody, which is covered in what a LinkedIn lookup can and cannot do.

Does TikTok show who viewed your profile?

Yes, but only for people who have turned the same setting on, and it is off until you do.

TikTok documents profile view history as a switch in the privacy settings. Turn it on and you see accounts that visited your profile in the past 30 days — but only accounts that also have it on. Visit somebody who has it enabled and they see you, which is the price of the feature.

Two eligibility limits come with it. TikTok states you must be 16 or older and have fewer than 5,000 followers to have access at all, which quietly excludes the accounts most likely to want it.

Turning it off is symmetrical. You stop seeing who viewed you, and others stop seeing that you viewed them, so an empty list means the setting rather than an empty room.

What the platforms documenting nothing return instead

A profile, and no record of anyone reading it.

Four public endpoints were read on 3 August 2026 and their fields counted. Duolingo returned 38 fields: the streak, the total XP, the courses, the country, the creation date. Steam's public profile XML returned no such field, Bluesky's getProfile returned none, and Spotify's documented user object holds 8.

Not one field in any of them records who opened the page. That is the honest formulation, and it is stronger than asserting a negative: no such feature is documented and the public interface returns no such field.

What those profiles do publish is covered platform by platform — Duolingo, Spotify, Steam and Bluesky — and it is a great deal more than most owners expect.

Which actions actually notify the other person?

The ones that leave something behind, and there are more of them than people think.

• Following. A notification, plus a permanent line on a list the other person can read whenever they like. Unfollowing does not undo the notification they already saw.
• Opening a story. Instagram states plainly that when you see somebody's story they can tell you have seen it, and WhatsApp shows a viewer list for status updates.
• Screenshotting. Snapchat marks the chat with a distinct icon for a screenshot of a Snap, a Snap with audio, or a Chat. Instagram, surface by surface.
• Reading a message. WhatsApp's blue double tick reports it, and the status viewer list stops working for anyone who turns read receipts off.

X sits oddly in this company. It publishes a view count on most posts, visible to anyone, and counts any logged-in reader — including the author. It is a number and never a name, which is the distinction the whole page turns on.

Which applies depends on the platform: Instagram, Facebook, X and Snapchat are covered separately.

Why a profile viewer app cannot work

Because the field it claims to read was never written.

Facebook is the bluntest on this and worth quoting: the platform does not let people track who views their profile, and third-party apps cannot provide that functionality either. It asks you to report any app claiming otherwise, which is an unusual thing for a company to put in a help page.

So what does the app actually do? It asks for your login, or for permission on your account, and then shows a list assembled from people who interacted with you — followers, likers, commenters — dressed as viewers. The plausible ones use your own engagement data. The rest are invented.

How do you check what strangers can already see?

By looking yourself, from outside, with the same tools anybody else would use.

Log out and open your own profile on each platform, because the signed-out view is the one a stranger gets and it is rarely the one you remember setting. Then run your own email address and your own usual handle through a lookup: this site checks an address against 71 sources and a username against 71, with 13 for a name and 8 for a phone number.

What that returns is where you have accounts and what those profiles publish. It does not return profile views, on any platform, because nothing published makes that available — and a report claiming otherwise would be inventing it.

The full version of that exercise is the audit of what is published about you, which goes further than the platforms in this table.

Is it legal to look at somebody's profile?

Reading a public page is lawful. What you do next is where the obligations attach.

In the United States, using what you found to decide employment, housing, credit or insurance falls under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, and we are not a consumer reporting agency. In the EU and the UK, a public profile is personal data and processing it needs a lawful basis.

There is a second line worth naming. Buying a profile viewer that works by taking your credentials, or by scraping behind a login, moves the question from privacy law to the platform's terms and sometimes to computer misuse law.

The general shape holds across the rest of this blog and is set out in the piece on looking someone up legally. Public does not mean unregulated.

Common questions