Unlike other social networks Pinterest has fairly straightforward privacy settings that are wide ranging and can greatly limit who can see your Pinterest account, activity, pins, boards, repins etc.
By adjusting the settings below you can make your Pinterest account completely private and impossible to find, even by those who make an active, determined effort.
Furthermore, even if a person does somehow come across your Pinterest account, they won’t be able to connect it to you.
Remove your Pinterest account from search engines (e.g. Google, Bing etc.)
To prevent your Pinterest account from appearing in search engines such as Google or Bing you need to:
- Press the three “…” on mobile or the “downward chevron” on desktop.
- Go to Settings.
- Go to Privacy and data.
- Activate the Search privacy option
If you’re on Desktop:
- Click I understand.
- Click Save.
Note: Search engines usually rescan and update their search results every 4-6 weeks on average.
This means that even if you have changed this setting, your account will still appear in search results for a little while more.
If you don’t want to wait and want to remove your profile from search results right now, then you can use Google and Bings content removal features to stop appearing in search results right away.
First,you will need a link to your Pinterest account so the search engines know what results to remove.
On mobile, you can get your Pinterest account link by pressing the three “…” on your profile page -> Copy Profile Link.
This is a shortened link, meaning the content removal tools won’t able to read it. The short link should look something like this: https://pin.it/ABuBXCU
To get the full link on mobile, open your browser and then copy that short link into the address bar and press Enter.
After the page loads, the short link will be expanded into the full link.
In this case, https://pin.it/ABuBXCU becomes https://pinterest.com/invisibleme29183/ .
On desktop, simply go to your Profile, select the link in the address bar and copy it.
Once you have the link to your account, go to the content removal tools for Google and Bing so they can be deleted from the search results:
Change your Pinterest profile username
Another important setting to make your Pinterest profile private and invisible is to change your profile username, your First and Last name as well as your profile picture.
Even if you’ve stopped your account from appearing in Google or Bing, other Pinterest users can still search for your account from within the app.
This is especially true if you’ve created your Pinterest account by logging in with Facebook or Google, since Pinterest will auto-complete your basic profile information with the ones from Facebook or Google.
To change this information, go to Edit public profile on either mobile or desktop.
From there, change your profile username, as well as First and Last name so it cannot be connected to your personal identity.
The more obscure and weird the names you choose, the harder it will be for other users to search for your Pinterest profile.
Your Pinterest profile username is especially important, because Pinterest builds a link to your account by combining pinterest.com with your profile username, as seen in: https://pinterest.com/invisibleme29183/.
By changing your profile username, you will also break the previous link to your account so people can’t access it anymore.
The best part about this is that your account will work just the same as before, except others can no longer find it.
If your profile photo is very unique to you, then you might want to change that one too.
This is because someone could use Reverse Image Search to find other social media profiles where your image appears, potentially connecting those other social media profiles to your Pinterest account.
Make Pinterest boards private
The two steps above have made your account pretty difficult to find and hidden the connection between your real identity and your Pinterest account.
However, other users can still see your activities on Pinterest, such as boards, pins, repins, etc.
To stop this from happening, you’ll need to go 1-by-1 to each of your Pinterest boards and make those boards secret.
To do this, simply go to a board, find the three “…” and press Edit Board.
From there, you need to activate the Keep this board secret feature.
Unfortunately, you will need to do this with every board on your account.
If you don’t, the board will be considered public, so every other user can see what’s in there.
Stop others from messaging you
Pinterest has an entire set of settings that can control who can, or cannot, message you.
To edit these, go to Settings -> Social permissions -> Message settings.
The list of settings is pretty extensive and covers all possible situations in which another user can message you.
If you wish to ignore every message and not be contacted at all, go to each of the categories and select Ignore.
Doing so also has the added benefit of preventing Pinterest from sending you pesky message notifications on your phone.
Other data privacy settings
The last set of settings on Pinterest you might be interested in are those that control how your data is being shared.
Unfortunately, you cannot stop Pinterest from collecting information about you, but you can at least limit how much information Pinterest sends to other sites you visit and vice versa.
To do so, go to Settings -> Privacy and data and scroll down until you reach the following settings:
If you don’t want personalized ads, simply deactivate all of these settings.
Check how your Pinterest account looks like for other users
If you want to check that everything is ok and your account is 100% private and untraceable then you can do the following test:
- Copy the link to your profile.
- Open an incognito window on your mobile/desktop browser.
- Paste the link to your Pinterest account in the incognito window.
If everything is ok, your Pinterest username, profile link, profile picture and first and last names should have changed to the new ones you’ve just set.
Your account activity should also appear empty, without any Pins or boards.
If you can still see some of your Pins or boards, this means you haven’t made all of your boards secret.
To fix this, simply go back to your Pinterest app, find the boards that are still public, make them secret and try again.
That should be pretty much it, your Pinterest account should now be completely private, invisible and untraceable to you.