How to view LinkedIn profiles anonymously

(MoneyWatch) LinkedIn (LNKD) recently has started emphasizing who is viewing your profile -- you might have noticed that you now get regular notifications and summaries when anyone looks you up.

That's handy, I suppose, and as the recipient of such messages it is good intelligence to help you see who is reading up on you and checking you out. But what if you are the person doing the viewing? You might not always want people to know that you are reviewing their profiles.

Thankfully, as Digital Inspiration recently pointed out, LinkedIn makes it very easy to control the level of detail that gets shared when you look at other people's profiles.

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To do it, go to LinkedIn and choose "Settings" under the dropdown for your name in the upper right of the window. Then click "Select what others see when you've viewed their profile."

Now you've got three choices:

Your name and headline. LinkedIn reports your full name, title and company. In other words, there's no ambiguity about who you are.

Anonymous profile characteristics such as industry and title. This option just reports semi-anonymous information such as "media director at XYZ Corp."

You will be totally anonymous. Use this option if you don't want to reveal anything about yourself.

[marty-marty]

I think the most simple way is to use proxies, i take proxies from http://www.proxybridge.com, works great!

[Tilulu_dk]

Nice info but you forgot to inform about the fact that people who check LinkedIn profiles anonymously will not get the right to see who checked their own profile. To be able to see who viewed your profile again, you will need to reverse to the name and headline setting and being visible to everyone.

[Suzanne Lucas]

Dave,

Thank you! This is super helpful. I'm going to go change my settings right now.

[sparkyourlinkedin]

Dave,

Thank you for sharing this article. We would like to take this moment to preface to people who are job searchers that we do not suggest you view profiles anonymously. When you are a job seeker you need as many people seeing your profile as possible. The more places and ways you get your name out there, the quicker you will find a position. Statistics show your resume has to be viewed 500 times before you will find a position through LinkedIn. That being the case, you need other people to look at you just like you are looking at them. For more LinkedIn tips and tricks you can visit our blog at www.sparkyourlinkedin.wordpress.com. We hope to see you there soon.