If you are an active Facebook user you must have seen this bait on your Facebook timeline very often. Or perhaps, this can be attributed to the fact that we, as humans, have a deeply curious nature and we love to measure our popularity online. Whatever is the reason, the question of 'Who viewed my Facebook profile' or 'Who visited my Facebook page' remains one of the most popular ones in the last decade.
Given the amount of time and energy many of us put in making a Facebook page charming, it’s quite natural for someone to get curious about their profile visitors.
If you are one of these curious folks, then get ready for some disappointment. No, FB 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 let you see who visited your profile and vice versa.
As Facebook slowly replaced Orkut on the social media platform, this was one of the questions that refused to fade away. And even when you choose to forget about it, the third-party app notifications will make sure that the curiosity is kindled once again.
Given the amount of time and data that Facebook has invested 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
And it’s highly unlikely that the social media giant would be outsourcing the profile IDs or the profile visitors for answering something as trivial as 'Who visited my Facebook profile'.
To put it simply, they have the data but no, they are not sharing it with anyone.
App Alternatives
Given a number of results that Google fetches when you type in the query in the search box, or the fact that every month or so, someone would share a post containing the list who visit, the myth is far from dead.
There are a number of Facebook apps, Android apps or Google Chrome extensions which does a good job in fanning the 'Facebook timeline visitors' rumor. However, many of the apps take the two-way street.
They will show you a result only when you trade something for it. It can be anything from just your personal information, the right to access your friends’ list or plainly asking for a payment if you want to see who views your profile. Or on far worse condition, they can even infect your system with malware.
One common method doing its rounds is that it lets you see the visitors from the source code( right click on the browser > select view page source).
But if you were to examine closely, it’s only a chat list from your friends list and contains little from your non-friend(Do a Ctrl+F and search for InitialChatFriendsList). In other words, FB won’t show you profile IDs who are not your Facebook friends.
In short, the functionality of these apps can at best be visualized of entirely doing nothing or stealing your data in the guise of a click bait app.
Not to forget that fact that once you give an app permission, it stays there until you revoke the access manually.
So, you see, there’s a lot at stake when you just want to see who visited your profile.
How to Stay Safe
If in case you had given any app such permissions before, head over to Settings > Apps and revoke the access. At this point, there’s another question which arises — how do I know if somebody is tracking me on Facebook?
Well, over the years Facebook has gone the extra miles to bring in a lot of safety features into the platform. Notable ones are controlling who can discover your Facebook profile and who can see your basic information on Facebook or who can view your Facebook profile picture.
Though there’s a long way to go, these steps ensure that your online activity doesn’t end up being shown to the whole world.
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.
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