TikTok: How to see who has looked at your profile

Profile feature lets you see who has looked at your account in the last 30 days

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TikTok is now letting people around the world see who has visited their profile.

The feature means that users can see when a person clicked onto their account – with some restrictions.

Like other platforms such as LinkedIn, it means that when a logged-in users visits a profile they will appear in a list. That list can then be seen by the owner of the account, but nobody else.

TikTok has been slowly rolling out the feature for more than a year. It was initially spotted by users who saw references to it hidden in the app, before it rolled out more generally – and it is now available to everyone.

But it must be manually turned on, and so the change does not mean that you will have been exposed as visiting a profile without knowing about it. It can also be switched back off when it is enabled.

There are a number of limitations on the feature, which are seemingly intended to protect privacy. Users need to be at least 16 to see it, for instance, and also have fewer than 5,000 followers.

But mostly importantly the tool will only work for other people who have it turned on: users can only see people who visited their profile if they too have the profile view history option turned on.

In that way, it is similar to other privacy features in apps such as WhatsApp. There, for instance, users can only see read receipts and information about when a user is online if they choose to give that information away about themselves.

The feature is switched on by opening the profile page, clicking the settings button in the top-right corner, and then choosing the settings option. Click on settings and privacy, then privacy, and then profile views.

That will open up the page and show the people who have been on a profile in the last month or so. If it is not switched on already, then that same page will offer the option to do so.

The data only starts being shown from the moment the switch is turned on, meaning that there will be no way of seeing who had visited an account before then.

To switch the feature off, click on one of the notifications that the app sends when someone has viewed your profile. That will take you to the same profile views page, which includes a settings cog that can be used to switch the history tool back off again.