How to Find Out Who Viewed Your TikTok
As long as social media has been around, there have been people who have asked, “Can you see who has viewed your profile?” For the most part, the answer was “No.” Online anonymity has made it easier to see other people’s profiles, and unlike DMs, the user usually won’t know if you’ve looked into their account or not. That is, before TikTok: The app is now rolling out a feature that lets you see who’s viewed your profile, but that means it does the same for the accounts you’ve visited as well.
I opened the app this morning and saw a new notification: “Enable profile browsing history?” with a cheerful illustration of a happy person, a cloud and a bird. The relevance eludes me, but the drawing is not as eye-catching as the feature update. TikTok will now report who has viewed your profile and in turn tell others when you have viewed their profile.
It’s an interesting move from a company that has a bad reputation for user privacy , but I guess there’s an argument that can be made both ways: TikTok users may deserve to know who visits their profiles and watches their videos (maybe , you are curious to see who is looking for you on the platform). On the other hand, maybe users deserve to have their online activity not shared with every account they check. After all, almost no other social media platform does this: you don’t get logged in when someone’s Facebook page is visited, or you don’t sound an alarm when you’re browsing a Twitter feed.
In fact, LinkedIn is the only social network I can think of that has a feature like this. TikTok and LinkedIn – what a duo.
To be honest, this is not a general feature applicable to the entire platform. Before you can see the accounts that have viewed your profile, you need to enable this feature yourself. This means that if you don’t want anyone to know that you’ve seen their profiles, you can simply disable this feature. However, the trade-off is that you won’t be able to see who has visited your profile, so you need to decide which scenario suits you best.
If you choose to enable this feature, you will not see everyone who has viewed your profile. In the same way that people won’t be able to see your activity if this feature is disabled, others can privately view your account without revealing themselves as long as they disable this feature. If you enable this feature, TikTok will show you accounts that have visited your profile in the last 30 days.
TikTok says you can disable this feature at any time, but doesn’t elaborate on what that actually means. Sure, the app won’t tell people that you’ve viewed their profiles from now on, and you’ll likely lose your current reports, but will other people still see that you’ve viewed their account? It is possible that this information is also erased, but this is not clear: it may remain there until this 30-day limit expires.
It will be interesting to see who takes advantage of this feature. If the profile browsing history is successful, perhaps we will all get used to this exposure in the same way that we are used to reading receipts for certain messaging platforms. In the meantime, the choice is yours: full TikTok anonymity or full TikTok ads?