Can You See Who Views Your Facebook Profile?
Don’t fall victim to phishing scams that tell you that you can do this!
By Corbin HartwickUpdated on July 25, 2024
IN THIS GUIDE
Privacy concerns around social networks have been growing for some time now, especially in regards to one of the biggest players in that arena: Facebook. Both current and prospective users are worried about people stalking them on social media, whether those people are strangers or just obsessive acquaintances. So a question that comes up frequently is: can you see who views your Facebook profile?
There are several theories about how to accomplish this scattered across the Internet. However, the general consensus from tech experts – and the official position of Facebook – is that none of them work for that exact purpose (at least not anymore). The good news is there are a bunch of other clues that can reveal who is interacting with your Facebook content, as well as several settings that can limit who sees what you put on Facebook. Let’s start with the key question: does Facebook tell you who viewed your profile?
Can you see who views your Facebook page or profile?
It isn’t possible to tell who merely visits your Facebook profile or Page. But if they interact with your profile or Page in certain ways (like sending a friend request, posting / reacting to / commenting on content, or watching a Story or live video), Facebook will reveal who they are.
One reason for this is to protect the privacy of Facebook’s users. We get that you value your own privacy and don’t want people stalking your Facebook profile or Page. However, Facebook also doesn’t want its users to be able to stalk each other by knowing who has merely looked at their profile or Page. In the absence of any other sort of interaction, someone may have just stumbled upon a profile or Page by accident, or visited it out of curiosity but then decided they weren’t actually interested in it after all.
Another reason is that it’s possible to view some public types of content on Facebook without being logged into Facebook, or even actually having a Facebook account. So even if Facebook was able to tell you which users visited your Page, it wouldn’t be able to do so for people not logged into Facebook. It wouldn’t be able to tell who those users were, or if they were Facebook users at all.
Could I ever tell who viewed my Facebook profile recently?
Facebook allegedly added a temporary function on its iOS app in some regions that allowed users to check who viewed their profile recently. It was accessed by opening the Main Menu, then selecting Privacy Shortcuts, and then selecting Who Viewed My Profile? Users could see who viewed their profile – as well as their most recent posts – over the past 30 days. This function was reportedly available for a period of time between 2018 and 2023.
What we can say is that this functionality has since been removed, so trying to see who viewed your Facebook profile recently is no longer possible, whether you are using the iOS app or not. It’s also unlikely Facebook would ever bring this feature back.
Does Facebook show who viewed your profile or other content?
Though Facebook doesn’t allow you to track who specifically viewed your profile or Page, it does allow you to track some things that may indirectly reveal who has visited your profile or Page.
Actions that explicitly tell you who’s interacting with your Facebook content
Some interactions by other Facebook users with your profile, Page, or other content will directly reveal who they are. However, these actions don’t necessarily require a user visiting your profile or Page. So there’s no way to tell when – or even if – those users actually viewed your profile or Page. Such actions include:
Sending you a friend request
Posting something on your profile
Reacting to, or commenting on, one of your posts or comments
Viewing a post you share, react to, or comment on in a group (depending on the group’s privacy settings)
Viewing a video while you are broadcasting it live
A friend or Facebook Messenger contact viewing one of your stories (depending on your privacy settings)
Metrics on the total number of people interacting with you on Facebook
Some metrics on Facebook can tell you how many people are interacting with your profile, Page, or other content – and maybe even when. However, they won’t tell you exactly who those people are, or even if they’re Facebook users at all. These metrics are available on:
Pages
Profiles that are set to “professional mode”
Static videos, including “reels” and recordings of previous live broadcasts
Stories (they will show the number of non-friends and non-Messenger contacts who viewed them)
Other vague indicators of who may have interacted with you on Facebook
Certain other signals on Facebook may hint that someone has visited your profile or Page. However, most of them are influenced by other factors, such as who you interact with frequently, who your friends are, and what information you add to your profile or Page. Therefore, they are not very reliable at telling you if or when someone viewed your profile or Page. These include:
The order of your friends in your friends list
The order of your friends in your chat list
Friend Suggestions
People You May Know
Certain tags in your profile or Page’s source code, such as “buddy_id” or “InitialChatFriendsList”
Do Facebook profile viewer apps work?
Facebook’s official line on third-party apps is that none should be able to provide the functionality to track which users have viewed your profile or Page. It further states that users who encounter any app in Facebook’s library claiming to provide this functionality should report the app to Facebook.
There are some apps outside Facebook, including websites and browser extensions, that may claim to be able to track who views your Facebook profile or Page. An example is Grabify, a website that allows users to create hyperlinks that log the IP addresses (and other hardware/software information) of people who click on them. This can tell you the general area where a person is located, but it can’t tell you exactly who they are. It also doesn’t work unless the person actually clicks on the link, which they may not if they’re just viewing your Page or profile.
Warning
The bottom line is that these apps are unreliable at best. At worst, they are phishing scams that may hijack your account, steal your private account information, or damage your device. So downloading and using these services to try and find out who visited your Facebook profile or Page just isn’t worth the risk in most cases. You are better off to make your Facebook account completely private if you want to control who visits your profile.
Can I control who views my Facebook profile or Page?
If controlling who views your Facebook profile is of concern to you, there are several Facebook settings you can change that can be used to limit the amount of information about you that people see on Facebook. To reach them:
Log into your Facebook account and open the Account menu.
Next, select Settings & Privacy.
Finally, select Settings.
The most relevant settings are under the “Audience and Visibility” heading.
The categories of settings you can control are:
Profile Details – Information about your identity, contact methods, life events, and things you like.
How People Find and Contact You – Settings for who can send you friend requests, view your friends list, find you on Facebook via your contact information or an external search engine, and message you on Messenger if they aren’t your friends.
Posts – Set the default audience for any future posts you make, or quickly change the audience for all of your past posts.
Stories – Determine who can see your stories, and whether they can share your stories that are public or that specifically mention them. Also decide if you want to keep private archival copies of your stories after they disappear.
Reels – Choose who can see your “reels” videos.
Followers and Public Content – Pick who can follow you, see who follows you, and see what you follow. You can also control who can interact with your public content, and whether you’re notified when it happens.
Profile and Tagging – Select who can post on your profile, see what others have posted on your profile, or see posts you’re tagged in appear on your profile. You can also prohibit certain words from appearing in posts or comments on your profile, or decide who can share your posts to their story. Finally, you can choose whether or not you want to review a tag on one of your posts, or yourself being tagged in a post, before the tag goes live.
For more information on the specific settings you can change here, see our article on how to change your Facebook privacy settings.
Other social networks that allow you to see who viewed your profile
Again, out of privacy concerns, there aren’t many major social networks that will directly tell you who’s been looking at your profile. However, there are a few.
One is LinkedIn. The main reason for this is LinkedIn is a professional-oriented social network where people are often looking to recruit or be recruited for jobs. In this context, it’s advantageous for you to know who has viewed your profile, including what locations, industries, and job roles they work in. However, this feature is rather limited unless you have a subscription to LinkedIn Premium.
Another is TikTok. It has a setting called “Profile View History” that, when turned on, allows you to see which other TikTok users have viewed your profile within the past 30 days. However, there are some limitations to using this feature:
You must be 16 years of age or older.
Your profile must have fewer than 5000 followers.
The user viewing your profile must also have the “Profile View History” setting enabled.
To sum up, if you want to know how to see who is stalking your Facebook profile or Page, know this: there is no legitimate way to directly do it. So you also shouldn’t trust third-party programs that claim to be able to do it. Not only do these apps violate Facebook’s terms of use, but many of them can also put your device, account, and private information at risk.
While you can’t directly find out who has viewed your Facebook profile or Page, there are some ways you can indirectly guess who might be visiting you. Certain actions by other Facebook users will tell you exactly who is interacting with your content, while others will let you know how many people are interacting with your content (but not who they are). You can use these clues to tell who’s most likely to have checked out your Facebook profile or Page, but there’s currently no way to definitively know.
In addition, Facebook has several settings that let you change the audience of your Facebook content. So if there are parts of your Page, profile, or posts you would rather keep private, you can set them to be visible by only your friends (and sometimes their friends), only certain friends, or just yourself. You can also limit how people outside of your circle of friends on Facebook can find, contact, and interact with your profile or Page.