LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network with over 810 million members worldwide. It’s a great platform for connecting with other professionals, discovering career opportunities, showcasing your skills and achievements, and building your personal brand.
However, you may sometimes want to view someone’s LinkedIn profile more discreetly without them being notified or your visit showing up in their visitor analytics. This is where LinkedIn’s private mode can come in handy.
In this article, we’ll explain what LinkedIn’s private mode is, why you may want to use it, and walk through how to view someone’s LinkedIn profile in private mode on both desktop and mobile.
What is LinkedIn Private Mode?
LinkedIn’s private mode allows you to browse member profiles more anonymously without leaving a digital footprint.
When you view someone’s profile normally while logged into your LinkedIn account, they will receive an alert that you visited their profile and your name and headline will show up under “Who’s Viewed Your Profile” in their analytics.
However, when you view a profile in private mode, the person won’t receive a notification that you viewed their profile. Your name also won’t appear in their viewer analytics. It will be as if you never visited their profile.
This can be useful if you want to:
- Research a person without signalling your interest to connect with them.
- View a profile of someone you don’t know well or haven’t contacted in a while.
- Discreetly check out profiles of competitors, partners, or potential hires.
Of course, you can also use private browsing simply because you want to maintain your own privacy without your browsing being tracked.
The key caveat is that while in private mode on LinkedIn, you won’t show up in other member’s visitor lists, but you also won’t be able to view who has visited your own profile or access any of your usual account features. It essentially logs you out of your LinkedIn account temporarily.
Why Use LinkedIn Private Mode?
Here are some of the main reasons you may want to view a LinkedIn profile more anonymously using private mode:
- Research without revealing interest – If you want to research someone you may be interested in connecting with professionally, you can scope out their full profile and background privately before reaching out to them.
- View old connections – Check out profiles of people you used to work with or went to school with without signalling you looked them up if you are no longer actively connected.
- Discover new industry contacts – Research people working at competitor or partner companies that you may want to connect with down the line.
- Vet candidates anonymously – Discreetly evaluate potential job candidates by viewing their full LinkedIn profile and activity.
- View company pages – Research partner, competitor, or client companies and their employees without revealing yourself.
- Maintain personal privacy – Browse LinkedIn without your own activity being tracked and added to your profile statistics.
The privacy of private mode allows for more discreet browsing when you don’t necessarily want the person or company to know you viewed their profile. It gives you more control over your own activity tracking and digital footprint.
How to Use LinkedIn Private Mode on Desktop
Viewing LinkedIn profiles privately on the desktop website is quick and easy to activate. Here’s how to do it:
- Go to www.linkedin.com and log into your account if you aren’t already logged in.
- Click on your profile avatar icon at the top right and select Private mode from the dropdown menu.
- This will launch a private browsing session. You’ll notice the top bar turns gray and notes “You’re now in private mode.”
- Navigate to the profile you want to view privately.
- You can now browse their profile, activity, connections etc. without the person being notified or your view being logged.
- Once you’re done, click on the Exit private mode button at the top right to return to your normal LinkedIn session.
It’s that quick to dip into a private browsing session on the LinkedIn desktop site. The person whose profile you view will have no indication you ever visited their page while in private mode.
How to Use LinkedIn Private Mode on Mobile
The LinkedIn mobile app also makes it easy to view profiles privately on the go. Here’s how to do it on iOS or Android devices:
- Launch the LinkedIn app and log into your account if you aren’t already logged in.
- Tap on your profile picture at the top left of your homepage.
- Select the Private mode option.
- You are now browsing in private mode. Navigate to the profile you want to view.
- Once finished viewing the profile, tap on the back arrow at the top left and toggle private mode off to exit.
This will prevent the person whose profile you viewed from seeing that you visited them.
What You Can and Can’t Do in Private Mode
While in private mode, your identity and activity are hidden from other members. However, there are limitations to what you can do while privately browsing LinkedIn:
You CAN:
- View other member profiles and activity updates
- Search for people, jobs, companies, groups, etc.
- Preview job postings
- Read articles and news posts
You CAN’T:
- View who has looked at your profile
- See profile view analytics
- Like or comment on posts
- Connect with members
- Join groups
- Apply to jobs
- Send InMail messages
- Edit your profile or make any posts
So you maintain full read-only access to browse LinkedIn anonymously, but interaction features will be disabled until you exit private mode.
Conclusion
Viewing LinkedIn profiles privately can be useful for discreet research and browsing without revealing your own identity or activity trail. Both the desktop site and mobile apps make it quick and easy to toggle a private session on or off anytime you want to keep your searching confidential.
Just keep in mind the limitations of what features you can use in private mode. But for purely browsing member profiles, companies, or jobs sans the tracking, private mode lets you dig in anonymously.
Use it whenever you want to scope something out in the LinkedIn universe without signaling your interest until you’re ready to actively reach out or engage.