Whatsapp is founded in 2009 and acquired by Facebook in 2014, It is today the most popular instant messaging platform and a prominent successful startup story. It boasts 2.5 billion users from over 180 countries, and India is the biggest market, as it has become the de-facto messaging app for personal use. The popularity is now forcing even businesses to use WhatsApp for communicating with their customers.
In this pandemic, it has been an essential medium to connect with friends and loved ones. After Facebook acquired WhatsApp in 2014, we can see many updates and changes in the features that permit the users to grab an overall improved experience. The privacy settings have been strengthened, and the developers are working to fix bugs and data breaches.
Moreover, its end-to-end encryption makes it a safe messaging application to connect with anyone without any hassle. Unlimited real-time messaging, free international voice, and video calling make WhatsApp a better platform than simply a texting app.
Recently, the developers have added WhatsApp for Business, which is intended to help entrepreneurs and business owners exchange their platform on a global market. This app is helping to engage customers and making it easy to showcase their products so that it is available to any part of the world.
As with every other communication platform, increasing user connections means enhanced privacy risks and security concerns. Possibilities of unwanted attention and misuse of your profile picture, status, and communication can make you apprehensive about the use.
As a result, people have been looking for ways to see who viewed their profiles to reduce such concerns. A social network like LinkedIn provides such information in a limited manner for free users, while paid users can see all the visitors to their profile.
However, Facebook and Instagram do not have any direct way to see this information. Being a part of Facebook, WhatsApp follows the same policy, and there is no direct way to see who visited your profile.
But don’t worry, there are still some ways to do that.
Here you can find a complete guide on how to see who viewed your Whatsapp profile on Android and iPhone devices.
Sound’s good? Let’s get started.
How to See Who Viewed Your Whatsapp Profile
Unfortunately, you cannot see who viewed your profile on Whatsapp. WhatsApp has no feature that lets you see who viewed your profile. However, you can control who sees your profile photo, last seen, about info, and status.
While WhatsApp does not provide any way to view your profile visitors, it allows you to view the information about those who viewed your Whatsapp status.
The status feature enables you to share temporary updates in the form of photos, videos, text, links, GIFs, etc. These updates are active until 24 hours from the time of posting, and then they disappear. Since then, status has become the chosen way of communicating your thoughts and news without getting involved in actual communication.
Whatsapp status is the best way to let everyone on your contact list know what’s up with you. At the same time, that status is active only for 24 hours, so you can share again without flooding the chatbox.
It will give you an idea of who is viewing your Whatsapp profile status. While you still have no clue about the profile viewers, you at least have some information to know if you need to be concerned.
Alternative Way to See Who Viewed Your Whatsapp Profile
Now, despite WhatsApp not offering any way to track who viewed your profile, you may get some indication by observation in a rare case. It is, of course, not a 100% reliable conclusion, and it doesn’t happen in every situation.
If someone is actually stalking you repeatedly by visiting your profile, there is a chance that they may press the call button by mistake. They might be quick enough to disconnect the call, but WhatsApp still gives you a missed call. If you see an unexpected missed call, you get alerted to the possibility of someone viewing your profile.
But, as we said earlier, this is a very unreliable way of drawing a conclusion.
Also Read: How to Get Notification When Someone is Online on Whatsapp
Do “Who Viewed Your Whatsapp Profile” Apps Works?
If you search in the Play Store or App Store, you will find many Whatsapp profile tracker apps that claim that they show you the information about profile visitors.
Some apps made similar claims in the case of Facebook and Instagram. However, none of those claims are true as WhatsApp does not provide any API for others to track the profile visitor information.
These apps pick up random contacts from your phone book and show them as your profile visitors. These apps are unreliable and can actually leave you with misinformation. We recommend that you stay away from these kinds of apps.
In general, you should be very careful about using such apps, as they will collect your personal data.
Does WhatsApp Business Have Any Possibility?
If you are an Instagram user, you might know that Instagram business accounts can track more information about their profile visitors.
While it still doesn’t allow you to see who viewed your profile, it gives an in-depth analysis of various parameters, including location, age, and gender.
There is a feature in WhatsApp Business, which offers some statistics on customer engagement and experience. But that statistic is related to the conversations. So using Statistics, you can track the sent, delivered, received, and read messages.
But, in WhatsApp, even a business account does not offer any additional information about profile views. So you might have a business account, you will still not be able to see your profile visitors.
Protecting Your Privacy on Whatsapp
For those who wish to ensure that they have maximum protection against unwanted views proactively, WhatsApp provides privacy settings.
These settings can hide your last seen, profile photo, about, status, or read receipts. If someone else has opted for these settings, you will not see their information too.
These are fine-grained settings and allow you to selectively choose which others can see data and which cannot be.
The others can’t see your info if:
- You have changed your privacy settings to “Nobody.”
- Your contact changed their last seen privacy settings to “Nobody.”
- You have changed your privacy settings to “My Contacts,” and the other person is not saved as a contact in your phone.
- You have blocked this contact.
For your Last Seen, Profile Picture, and About Info you get three options to choose from – Everyone, My Contacts, and Nobody. Here, “Everyone” indicates the persons who have your number, even if you haven’t saved their number. Now, for “My Contacts,” only the person whose contact you have saved can see your profile. And, coming to the “Nobody” option, if you choose this, then you are restricting your profile from any kind of viewer.
While for the WhatsApp status, you can control it by selecting the number of contacts with whom you want to share. Either you can share it with everyone in your contacts, or you can be limited to a specific group or a specific number.
How to Change WhatsApp Privacy?
The process is quite simple, all you have to do is open the WhatsApp application. In the top right corner, you will see three dotted symbols, i.e. More options. Tap on it, and it will lead you to Settings. From Settings, you will get several options to choose from, go to Account, then tap on Privacy.
Here, you will get to limit who can view your personal info. You can share your last seen with your contacts. But, if you decide to tap on Nobody, you will also be deprived of viewing other people’s Last Seen as well.
Final Words:
For your profile on WhatsApp, you have the option of tracking the story viewers to get an idea and control who sees your updates.
Of course, it still falls short of the primary objective. By setting your profile privacy settings, you can control who can see your profile. Unless the platform comes up with a policy change and allows us to view profile visitors, the status feature is what we need to use.
