Who viewed your Facebook profile…

This is the most effective trap for breaching the security of Facebook users. Simply because it’s far too tempting for a large share of the people on the social network, and it also “convinces” many users because it seems to do what it promises, when what it really does is a statistical analysis of how the network behaves. In other words, it “guesses” roughly who might have viewed your profile. However, this data is inaccurate and, depending on several factors, can be completely wrong.

The first thing to be clear about

There is no website or application that can actually tell who has visited a particular user’s profile.

Why?

Facebook doesn’t allow any kind of application to determine who has visited a profile; it directly breaches its privacy policy. It’s a myth, and it also appears on Facebook’s list of myths.

What are the risks?

These deceptive apps have many uses, from selling your personal data to using your account for spam. It’s important to bear in mind that most of these apps or services will have full control of your account.

If an app claims to be able to do this, you can report it at the following link.

But I tried it and it works…

There are apps, services and tricks of all kinds. However, some methods can only “guess”, very vaguely and probably wrongly, by simple inspection, who might be looking at your profile. This gives users the “feeling” that the tool works or that there are ways to get this information.

So how do they do it?

Some apps and tricks, for example, just try to guess who has viewed your profile by analysing which news, posts, etc. Facebook shows or prioritises about your friends.