How to Make Your LinkedIn Account Private

So you want to go a little more incognito on LinkedIn? Maybe you’re job hunting and don’t want your boss to notice. Maybe you’re doing competitor research and don’t want to leave a trail. Or maybe you just value your privacy. Whatever the reason — you’re in the right place.

This guide walks you through every setting you need to lock down your LinkedIn profile, browse anonymously, and control exactly who sees what. No fluff, no filler.

Let’s get into it.

📊 Quick Stat

LinkedIn has over 1 billion members across 200+ countries (LinkedIn, 2024). With that many people potentially viewing your profile, knowing how to control your visibility is more important than ever.

How to Make LinkedIn Account Private

There are several layers to LinkedIn privacy. We’ll cover each one so you can pick exactly the level of privacy that works for you.

Set Your Profile to Private (Limit Who Can See It)

This is the most straightforward step. Here’s how to do it:

1. Go to your LinkedIn profile and click on the “Me” icon at the top right.
2. Select “Settings & Privacy” from the dropdown.
3. Click on the “Visibility” tab on the left sidebar.
4. Under “Visibility of your profile & network”, click “Edit your public profile”.
5. On the right side, you’ll see a toggle that says “Your profile’s public visibility” — turn it off.

Once you toggle this off, people who aren’t logged into LinkedIn (and aren’t your connections) won’t be able to see your profile at all. It simply won’t show up in Google searches either.

Pro tip: If you want to stay visible to your connections but hidden from strangers, keep the toggle on but disable individual sections like your photo, headline, or contact info below that toggle.

Browse LinkedIn Anonymously (Private Mode)

This is huge if you’re researching prospects, competitors, or potential employers. By default, LinkedIn notifies people when you view their profile. Private mode turns that off.

Here’s how to enable it:

1. Click the “Me” icon → “Settings & Privacy”.
2. Go to the “Visibility” tab.
3. Under “Profile viewing options”, click “Change”.
4. Select “Private mode”.

That’s it. You can now browse profiles without leaving a footprint.

⚠️ Important Trade-off

When you’re in private mode, you also lose the ability to see who viewed your profile. It’s a two-way street. If you have LinkedIn Premium, you get more visibility into your viewers — but private mode still applies both ways.

About 70% of LinkedIn users regularly check who viewed their profile (LinkedIn internal data). If you’re doing research, you probably don’t want to be on that list.

Control Who Can See Your Connections

Your connection list is basically a roadmap of your professional network. Here’s how to keep it locked:

1. Settings & Privacy → Visibility.
2. Click “Connections” under “Visibility of your profile & network”.
3. Choose “Only you” from the dropdown.

This prevents recruiters, competitors, or anyone else from mining your network.

Hide Your Activity From Your Network

Every time you comment, like, or share something — LinkedIn can broadcast that to your connections. If you’re trying to stay low-key, turn this off.

1. Settings & Privacy → Visibility.
2. Scroll to “Share profile updates with your network” — toggle OFF.
3. Also check “Notify connections when you’re in the news” — toggle OFF.

This stops your connections from getting notified every time you do something on the platform.

Turn Off “Active Status” (The Green Dot)

You know that green dot that shows you’re online? Yeah, people can see that. Here’s how to hide it:

1. Settings & Privacy → Visibility.
2. Under “Visibility of your LinkedIn activity”, click “Manage active status”.
3. Set it to “No one”.

Simple. Clean. Private.

Control Who Can Send You Messages and Connection Requests

If you want to limit who can reach out to you:

1. Settings & Privacy → Communications.
2. Under “Who can reach you”, you can control:
   • Who can send you invitations
   • Whether people can message you via InMail
   • Whether your email address is visible

Set “Invitations to connect” to “Only people who know your email address or appear in your Imported Contacts list” if you want to be very restrictive.

Remove Yourself From Search Engines (Google, Bing, etc.)

By default, your LinkedIn profile can appear in Google search results. Here’s how to stop that:

1. Settings & Privacy → Visibility.
2. Click “Edit your public profile”.
3. In the right panel, toggle off “Your profile’s public visibility”.

Once you do this, search engines won’t index your profile and it won’t show up in external searches anymore. This can take a few days to fully propagate.

Limit What Shows on Your Public Profile

Even if your profile is “public,” you can control which sections are visible to non-connections:

Under “Edit your public profile” (same place as above), you’ll see a list of sections:

• Photo
• Headline
• Summary
• Current experience
• Past experience
• Education
• Connections count
• Recommendations
• Skills
• Courses, certifications, etc.

Turn off anything you don’t want the public to see. At minimum, most people hide their contact info and connection count.

Block Specific People

If there’s someone specific you don’t want viewing your profile:

1. Go to their profile.
2. Click the “More” button (three dots).
3. Select “Report/Block” → “Block”.

When you block someone, neither of you can see the other’s profile, send messages, or see each other’s content. They won’t be notified that they’ve been blocked.

Stat check: Research shows that professionals who actively manage their LinkedIn privacy settings are less likely to experience unwanted contact or data scraping (Pew Research, 2023).

Quick Summary: Key Privacy Settings Checklist

Here’s a fast-reference checklist you can run through right now:

• ☐ Public profile visibility → Off (or customized)
• ☐ Profile viewing mode → Private mode
• ☐ Connections visibility → Only you
• ☐ Share profile updates → Off
• ☐ Notify connections when in the news → Off
• ☐ Active status (green dot) → No one
• ☐ Who can send invitations → Restricted
• ☐ Search engine indexing → Off
• ☐ Public profile sections → Customized

Run through all of these and you’ll have one of the most locked-down LinkedIn profiles possible.

Conclusion

Making your LinkedIn account private isn’t complicated — it just requires knowing where to look. LinkedIn buries these settings across multiple tabs, which is probably why most people never touch them.

The key settings to hit: public profile visibility, private browsing mode, connections privacy, and activity broadcasting. Do those four and you’ll be in great shape.

Whether you’re doing competitive research, exploring new opportunities quietly, or just protecting your network from being scraped — these settings give you full control.

And if you’re on the other side of the equation — actively trying to reach the right people on LinkedIn — that’s exactly what we help with at SalesSo. We run complete LinkedIn outbound campaigns with precise targeting, personalized messaging, and scaling systems that consistently deliver 15–25% response rates.

Book a Strategy Meeting with SalesSo →