Can I See Who Viewed My Facebook Profile?

Can You See Who Viewed Your Profile?

‘Click here to see who viewed your Facebook profile’ — If you are an active Facebook user, you must have seen this bait on your Facebook timeline often. Given the time and energy many of us put into making a Facebook profile charming, it’s natural for someone to become curious about their profile visitors.

No, Facebook doesn’t let you know who has visited your profile—whether it’s friends or strangers. Nor is there any way to find out who has visited your Facebook profile.

Myth Origins

This myth seems to have originated from the days of Orkut. If you recollect, Orkut had the famous Profile Visitors option, which lets you see who visited your profile and vice versa.

As Facebook slowly replaced Orkut on the social media platform, this question refused to fade away. Given how invested Facebook is in tracking your online movement, it’s natural that they have this data. To put it simply, they have the data, but no, they are not sharing it with anyone.

App Alternatives

Given the number of results that Google fetches when you type the query in the search box or the fact that someone shares a post containing the list of visitors every month or so, the myth is far from dead.

Several Facebook Groups, Android apps, and Google Chrome extensions do an excellent job of fanning the ‘Facebook timeline visitors’ rumor. However, many of the apps are two-way streets.

They will show you a result only when you trade something for it. It can be anything from your personal information to the right to access your friend’s list or a payment. In worse conditions, they can infect your system with malware.

In short, these apps’ functionality can be visualized as entirely doing nothing or stealing your data in the guise of a clickbait app.

Remember that once you give an app permission, it stays there until you revoke the access manually or Android figures it out when it’s not used for a long time.

So, there’s a lot at stake when you want to see who visited your profile.

How to Stay Safe

If you have given any app such permissions before, go to Settings > Apps and revoke the access. At this point, another question arises—how do you know if somebody is tracking you on Facebook?

Over the years, Facebook has gone the extra mile to introduce many safety features to the platform. Notable ones control who can discover your Facebook profile, see your basic information on Facebook, and view your profile picture.

The bottom line is this: Facebook doesn’t tell you who visited your profile, nor does it tell others when you visited theirs. So, the next time you see an app advertisement, you know what to do.