TikTok Privacy Settings: A Calm, Step-by-Step Checkup
By the TikDop team ·
Most people never open TikTok's privacy menu. They sign up, start scrolling, maybe post a few videos, and leave everything on the defaults. That's fine for a lot of people. But the defaults are built for reach, not privacy, and it's worth ten minutes to make sure your account is set up the way you actually want.
This is a walk-through of the settings that make the biggest difference. Menu names move around between app versions, but you'll find almost everything under Profile → ☰ menu → Settings and privacy → Privacy.
First decision: public or private?
A private account means only people you approve can see your videos, follow you and see your followers list. Everyone else just sees your name, picture and bio.
A public account means anyone can see your videos, and your videos can be shown on the For You page to strangers.
There's no right answer. If you mainly use TikTok to watch videos and share the odd clip with friends, private is a sensible default. If you want to grow an audience or promote a business, you'll need to be public. TikTok also sets accounts for younger users to private by default, which is a good thing.
You can switch any time, but remember: switching to private doesn't un-share things people have already downloaded or screenshotted.
Who can interact with you
Under Privacy, you can decide who's allowed to:
- Comment on your videos — everyone, friends (people you follow who follow you back) or no one.
- Mention or tag you in their videos and comments.
- Send you direct messages — this is often limited to friends or people you follow by default, which is worth keeping.
- Duet and Stitch with your videos. A duet puts your video side by side with theirs; a Stitch clips part of your video into theirs. Great for creators, less great if you don't want strangers remixing a video of your kids.
A good middle ground for many people: comments open to everyone, but DMs, duets and stitches limited to friends.
Comment filters
Even if you leave comments open, you can filter them. TikTok has options to automatically hide spam and offensive comments, and to filter comments containing keywords you choose. If there's a word or nickname that keeps coming up in a way you don't like, add it to the list. Filtered comments are hidden from everyone except the person who wrote them, so it doesn't start a fight.
You can also restrict or block specific accounts. Blocking stops them seeing your content or contacting you at all.
Downloads
There's a setting that controls whether other people can download your videos through the app's built-in Save video option. Turning it off makes casual saving harder. It isn't a perfect lock — screen recording still exists, and public videos can be viewed in a browser — but it signals clearly that you'd rather your videos weren't saved and re-shared.
Liked, favourites, reposts and following lists
You can choose who can see:
- your Liked videos tab,
- your Favourites (saved videos and sounds),
- your Reposts,
- your Following list and Followers list.
Your liked videos can say a lot about you. If you'd rather keep that to yourself, set it to "Only me". The same goes for reposts. Tools like TikDop only ever show these lists when they're public, so changing the setting is all it takes.
Profile view history
TikTok has a Profile views feature. When it's on, you can see who looked at your profile in the last 30 days — but only people who also have it switched on can see you. It's off by default for many accounts and isn't available to younger users. We explain it in more detail in can people see who viewed their TikTok profile.
Suggesting your account to others
There's an option for whether TikTok suggests your account to people — for example, to your phone contacts, Facebook friends, people with mutual connections or people who open links you share. If you'd rather your boss or your ex didn't get you as a "suggested account", turn these off.
Related: be careful about syncing contacts. If you've synced them in the past, you can remove them in the settings.
Activity status
Activity status shows your friends when you're active on the app. If you'd rather not broadcast that, you can turn it off — though usually that means you can't see theirs either.
Location and personal details in videos
Settings only go so far. A lot of what gives away personal information is in the videos themselves:
- the street sign visible out of your window,
- your school or work logo on a shirt,
- a parcel label on the kitchen counter,
- your car's number plate in the background.
None of this is a reason to panic. It's just worth a two-second glance at the frame before posting, especially if you're public.
A five-minute checklist
If you only do a few things, do these:
- Decide public vs private, on purpose.
- Limit DMs to friends.
- Turn on spam and offensive comment filters.
- Set Liked videos to "Only me" unless you're happy for everyone to see them.
- Turn off "Suggest your account to others" options you don't want.
- Check your security settings too — our account security guide covers passwords and two-step verification.
Privacy settings aren't a one-time job. Have a quick look every few months, especially after a big app update, because new features sometimes arrive switched on.