You can turn off your visibility when browsing other people's profiles. By default, it should be anonymized anyway, unless you switched it when trying to view profile stats:

https://www.linkedin.com/settings/wvmp-visibility?goback=%2E...

Personally I keep mine fully on since it is a good way of passive contact (I once browsed ~1000 VCs with a headline that was somewhat provocative as an experiment and about half looked at my profile back and 6 of them emailed me asking what I was working on).

Note: I actually designed this feature at LinkedIn after doing a ton of interviews with people and going to multiple privacy organizations and the EU to make sure it wasn't violating anyone's privacy by making it a tit-for-tat system that was by default anonymized (if you click on profile stats, it prompts you to switch your setting if you want to see who has viewed your profile (or did when I was there)).

Thank you for the link. I'm surprised I haven't found earlier on my own. The only problem is though, it says it will disable Profile Stats (meaning that you can't tell who's been looking at your profile). I guess I don't really need that anyway.

Premium accounts still see it, though.

LI employee here. That's actually not correct. Premium accounts do not still see anonymous viewers.

I'm not sure exactly which accounts premium accounts can see have viewed their profile, but pretty sure all free accounts are included. Will get someone who has setting on anonymous to view my profile later and check, but for now there's only a couple of hidden names on there, looks like people who are more than 3 degrees away.

The "who has viewed your profile" feature leads to epic lulz. There is this forum on the internet that is full or racists, misogynists, and homophobes (and is tangentially useful for getting legal industry gossip). A major troll posted a link to a fake Linked-In page (under his control) with a comment along the lines of: "how did this person get this job with such a shitty resume" (or something like that). When people clicked on the link, if they had been logged onto their Linked-In, their real identity was revealed to the troll, who proceeded to out everyone on the forum. Hilarity ensued.

Hrm. That shouldn't work unless they are within three degrees of the person. Or at least, it didn't work when I was there. Views to people's public profiles weren't recorded and there is no automatic redirect to their private profile.

Links to people's private profiles have an auth token in it that is good only for the account that generated it, so unless you're relatively closely connected, you can't actually view links to random private profiles posted by people on the internet.

3 degrees of separation covers a lot of people.

Unless you upgrade your profile.

In fact, Facebook does quite the opposite - there's always been demand for "see who looked at your profile" apps on Facebook, and Facebook has always gone out of their way to squash them. It's something they most certainly don't want to happen on their platform, with good reason.

You can bet Facebook is storing that data though. And who knows what the future holds, perhaps Facebook will be forced to sell that data to its users in order to increase revenue and make stock holders content?

Yes, they are. They have an ranked array of your top contacted/stalked friends and they use it to speed up the topbar search.

In fact, there is an bookmarklet that shows the list: http://thekeesh.com/2013/03/updated-facebook-friends-ranking...

To be clear, it seems that the data exposed in this way is only affected by your own actions; i.e. it does not tell you who has been stalking you, just who you've been stalking.

The "good reason" is that if they made that information public they wouldn't be able to make as much money selling it.

A social network I used in eastern Europe would allow you to see people who viewed your profile if you paid a small transaction via SMS/phonebill. The functionality would last a month, I think. I thought that this was genius from a "how do we make money" standpoint, and all of my friends used it. Could you imagine the revenue possibilities for Facebook?

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but there seems to be an element of that already in LinkedIn.

http://help.linkedin.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/42

>You'll see profile stats about who's viewed your profile if:

>You have a premium account. This will also give you access to Profile Stats Pro.

>You have a free basic account and have set your privacy settings to show your name and headline.

In other words, as long as you shell out some cash you can avoid detection while viewing other people's profiles but still see when they view yours.

Yeah, didn't know that. Actually, what I especially found interesting was the dead-easy way of paying via your phone bill. I don't see that much here in the States.

You can disable the option in your profile settings to not show when you've viewed someones contact info, however, this means you'll no longer know who the people are the view your profile.

AKA copying OKCupid

Orkut still shows the people who viewed your profile.