LinkedIn is a popular social media platform used primarily for professional networking and job searching. LinkedIn Premium is a paid subscription service that provides users with additional features beyond the free basic account, such as being able to see who has viewed your profile. A common question that arises is whether LinkedIn Premium allows users to see other profiles that are viewing their page in incognito or private browsing mode.
What is LinkedIn Premium?
LinkedIn Premium is LinkedIn’s subscription service that provides users with extra features and perks beyond the free account. There are three tiers of LinkedIn Premium:
- Premium Career – focused on job seeking features
- Premium Business – focused on sales/business features
- Premium Hiring – focused on recruiting features
Some of the key benefits of LinkedIn Premium include:
- See who has viewed your profile
- Unlimited InMail messages
- Profile badge to stand out
- Expanded network with Premium search filters
- Insights on profile visitors and post statistics
- Additional job posting options and applicant insights
The ability to see who has viewed your profile is one of the main draws of LinkedIn Premium. But does this feature work when others are viewing your profile in incognito mode?
What is Incognito Mode?
Incognito mode, also known as private browsing, is a feature in most modern web browsers that allows you to browse the internet without your activity being saved in your browser history or cache. Any cookies or site data gathered during an incognito session is deleted after the window is closed.
Incognito mode is useful for:
- Privacy – stops browsing history being stored on a shared/public computer
- Research – looking up sensitive topics without impacting your profile and ad preferences
- Testing – previewing websites before public launch, testing your own site, etc.
- Prices – viewing prices as an anonymous visitor rather than logged in user
When you view a LinkedIn profile in incognito mode, LinkedIn is not able to store cookies or site data to associate with your profile or account during that browsing session.
Does LinkedIn Premium Show Views in Incognito?
The short answer is no, LinkedIn Premium does not allow you to see views or visitors to your profile that occurred during an incognito or private browsing session.
LinkedIn has confirmed that their Premium account view tracking does not override incognito settings and privacy controls in web browsers. All the major browsers including Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Edge prevent websites from being able to identify or track incognito users.
So if someone views your LinkedIn profile in incognito mode, it will not show up in the list of visitors under Premium account settings. The view tracking and visitor identification relies on browser cookies, so if cookies are disabled during incognito/private browsing, the visitor cannot be added to the view count.
Why Doesn’t LinkedIn Bypass Incognito Settings?
There are a few key reasons why LinkedIn does not bypass incognito mode and private browsing limitations:
- Privacy Laws – Bypassing incognito settings would violate many privacy laws around the world.
- Browser Security – The major browsers explicitly prevent tracking of incognito users, so LinkedIn has no technical capabilities here.
- User Trust – Respecting user privacy settings builds trust and alignment with user expectations.
- Limited Value – Many incognito views are accidental or exploratory, not high value views.
For these reasons, LinkedIn has aligned their Premium account settings with user expectations around privacy while browsing in incognito mode.
Privacy Laws
Many laws and regulations around the world prohibit companies from tracking users who have taken explicit steps to browse the web privately. For example, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the EU provides protections for users’ private data. Ignoring incognito settings would violate these data privacy regulations.
Browser Security
All major web browsers including Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Safari have explicit protections in place to prevent websites from identifying or tracking incognito users when privacy modes are enabled. They disallow storing cookies or site data that could be used for fingerprinting or tracking during an incognito session. So LinkedIn does not have any technical capabilities to bypass these protections.
User Trust
Respecting users’ privacy settings aligns with user expectations and builds trust. Users enable incognito mode to browse privately, so bypassing those protections would violate their trust. LinkedIn aims to provide transparency around their data practices.
Limited Value
Many incognito views are spur of the moment searches, accidental clicks or exploratory browsing, not necessarily high value profile views. So the limited incognito data does not provide enough value to justify overriding privacy controls. Prioritizing user trust is more important.
What Type of Views Does LinkedIn Premium Show?
While incognito views are not tracked, LinkedIn Premium does provide valuable insights into who has viewed your profile under normal browsing conditions when cookies/data can be stored.
Some examples of views that would show up for Premium users include:
- Visitors who viewed your profile while logged into their LinkedIn account.
- Users who clicked on your profile from LinkedIn search results or other LinkedIn pages.
- Profile views from shared links or embeds outside LinkedIn.
- Views where the visitor interacted with your profile for an extended time.
These types of engaged profile visitors are likely more valuable than brief incognito explorations anyway.
Can You “View” in Incognito on LinkedIn Without Being Tracked?
While your own incognito browsing is private, viewing someone else’s public LinkedIn profile in incognito mode can be detected in some cases.
On LinkedIn, merely viewing a profile does not always trigger a view registration – some level of engagement is required. But actions like scrolling down or clicking links on a profile do get tracked as views, even in incognito mode.
To view without leaving a trace, best practice is:
- Use a private/incognito window
- Visit the profile URL directly rather than clicking from LinkedIn
- Quickly view the content you need without scrolling or clicking
- Close the incognito window immediately after viewing
This will minimize any data that could be used for tracking the view back to your account.
How Can I See Anonymous LinkedIn Profiles?
There are a few different approaches to viewing LinkedIn profiles more privately without being tracked:
Incognito/Private Mode
Using your browser’s private browsing mode or incognito windows is the easiest way to view anonymously. Just open a new incognito window and navigate directly to the profile URL to view without being logged in or tracked.
Log Out of LinkedIn
Logging out of your LinkedIn account and browsing while signed out also prevents being linked to your account and profile views. Remember to close the browsing session fully to clear any cache.
Secondary “Burner” Account
Some advanced users maintain secondary “burner” LinkedIn accounts used specifically for anonymous viewing. By logging into this separate throwaway account, views are not linked back to their primary profile.
VPN or Proxy Services
Browsing LinkedIn through a VPN or proxy service hides your IP address and identity. The profile views would map back to the anonymous VPN server IP rather than your real location and identity.
Conclusion
To summarize, LinkedIn Premium’s view tracking does not override incognito or private browsing protections. Profile views occurring in an incognito/private window do not get registered in the Premium analytics. LinkedIn respects users’ privacy expectations by aligning with browser privacy standards.
While incognito views are not tracked, Premium provides useful insights into engaged profile visitors under normal browsing conditions. There are also ways to independently view LinkedIn more privately through methods like incognito windows. But in general, LinkedIn aims to balance view transparency with user privacy controls.