Do you like having complete control over your online dating profile? Although many dating sites don’t allow their members to hide their profile from other members, there are still some websites out there that let you control who views your profile and who gets to message you.
Here are four of the most popular dating websites that let you control the visibility of your profile so it is only available to the people you actually want to get in touch with.
Dating Sites That Allow Private Profiles
- com
- OkCupid
- MillionaireMatch
- Plenty of Fish (POF)
Simply visit these sites and view their privacy settings or compare them all together to see which one gives you the best privacy controls according to your needs.
Let’s begin by looking at how you can change privacy settings on each of these websites.
Hiding Your Profile on Match.com
Match.com has a very useful feature known as ‘Private Mode’. This feature allows you to control who gets to view your profile. But in order to avail this feature, you must first become a premium member on the site. This option is currently not available to free or trial members.
To turn on ‘Private Mode’, simply click on the ‘Power Up’ button at the top right of your browser window and you’ll see a bunch of options.
Now hit the Private mode button from the menu of the add-on features. Once you have this addon, you can easily switch to Private mode by turning it ‘on’ or ‘off’ from your profile settings screen.
With the private mode turned on Match.com, anyone who you have contacted in the past on the site will still be able to view your profile and interact with you, so it won’t affect any of your current chats that are going on between you and another member.
But once the option is turned on, your profile will automatically become invisible to all members on the site. From here on, when you see someone you are interested in, you can make your profile visible to them by initiating communication with them. Once you start chatting with them, your profile will become fully available to them to see.
Here are all the other ways you can make your profile visible to other members while the private mode is turned on.
- Accepting an event invite
- Adding a profile into your favorites
- Liking or commenting on a photo of the member
- Initiating matchphone
- Rating a member with a ‘Yes’ in your daily matches feed
- Sending or listening to a voicemail through matchPhone
- Sending the member an email
- Sending a member a Match me request
- Sending a member a wink
You can tell whether your profile is visible to others by looking at a purple badge next to their profile. Upon ‘mouse over’ on this badge, you’ll get a clear message saying ‘He/She can see you’. This message also appears under their profile picture.
Once you stop using Private Mode, your profile will automatically appear in ‘Who’s Viewed Me’ section of anyone whose profile you checked while you were in private mode. If you want to make sure no record of you visiting someone’s profile is kept even when the private mode is off, you need to use the mode with the ‘undercover’ feature of the site.
The undercover feature is not something you can easily turn ‘on’ or ‘off’ like in case of Private Mode. Instead, you will have to purchase an individual session that lasts 24 hours. During this special session, you can view all of your favorite profiles without the site notifying the member that you visited their profile.
The cost of the undercover session typically depends on the current promotions running on the site. But usually, it costs around $1.99 to use this feature for 24 hours.
You can purchase the undercover session the same way you purchase ‘Private Mode’ addon. Simply click on the Power up button on the top right of your window and you’ll be given a bunch of options including this one.
If at any time you decide that you want a person to know that you viewed their profile or ‘favorited’ them while in the undercover mode, you’ll simply have to redo it all over again once your undercover session has ended.
To see how much time is left until your undercover session ends, simply refer to a black bar on top of the page. This bar will tell you how much time is left until your undercover session ends.
Just keep in mind that using both ‘Private mode’ or ‘Undercover session’ will void your 6-month match guarantee.
Hiding Your Profile on MillionaireMatch.com
MillionaireMatch lets you control the visibility of your profile only if you are a Gold member at the site. A Gold membership roughly costs $70 depending on the promotions available for 1 month. If you want to get it for 3 months, you can buy it for $135 or $240 for 6 months. There are many other perks that come with the Gold membership, so make sure to read them before signing up.
Once you are a gold member, here is how you can control the visibility of your profile.
Look for the ‘my settings’ button on the top right of your screen and simply click it. Then click the ‘photo/profile privacy settings’. Now you’ll be presented with a bunch of options to select from which limits the visibility of your profile, photos, and activities.
Hiding Your Profile on Okcupid
OkCupid has an incognito mode that makes your profile visible only to members who you have liked or messaged before. You can comfortably browse the site and not a single soul will know that you were viewing their profile.
Once in ‘incognito mode’, your profile will also stop appearing in the Match Search or DoubleTake sections of the site or of anyone you have not liked or messaged yet. And if anyone finds your profile interesting and try to visit your profile page while you are incognito, a message telling them that this profile does not exist will automatically be sent to them.
The ‘incognito mode’ feature on OkCupid costs around $9.95 per month to use. This cost is sometimes less depending on the current promotions available.
In order to buy the incognito mode, simply click on the browser address bar and type ‘’/incognito’’ when you are logged into your OkCupid account. For example – www.okcupid.com/incognito.
You can also turn the mode on or off by clicking your photo at the top right of the screen and then selecting the settings tab. From there, click on the Privacy button on the left side of the screen. Now you can click ‘on’ or ‘off’ to go incognito.
Hiding Your Profile on Plenty of Fish
Making your profile invisible to others on Plenty of Fish is very easy, and best of all, it’s completely free.
In order to hide your profile, simply click on ‘Edit Profile’ on the menu bar situated at the top of the browser page. From there on, simply click on the option of hiding your profile.
Once your profile is hidden, you can turn it off by following the same steps. This time, you’ll see a new option letting you unhide your profile from others.
Related Reading: The best headlines for your POF profile!
While your profile is hidden, it will not appear in any of the search results on the site, nor will your photo will be visible on the featured images feed. You can also make your profile selectively visible to others. Here’s how you can do this.
- Contacting anyone unhides your profile automatically from them
- Favoriting a member unhides your profile
- Anyone who has you on their favorites list can see your profile
- Anyone who has messaged you before can see your profile
- Anyone who searches on Plenty of Fish using your exact user name can see your profile
If at any time you don’t want a particular member to see or have access to your profile, simply click on ‘favorites’ in the menu bar and click on ‘who fav’d me’. From there you can restrict their access by simply removing them from the list.
Plenty of Fish has made it hard to search a member by their user name, but there are still a few ways people can use this feature. If you are worried that you will eventually get discovered because of your user name, simply change your user name. To do that, you will have to buy a premium membership at the site.
A premium membership at POF starts at $38.70 for 3 months, $51 for 6 months, and around $81 for 1 year. By upgrading your profile to premium, you’ll get a host of other useful features for your profile. Make sure to go through these additional features before signing up with a premium subscription.
How to Manage Your Dating Profiles Easily
If you are the kind of person who enjoys having complete control over your profile, you can use a third party ‘match-me’ service on the internet that collects a set of people from one of these sites and gives you a list to pick from. You are matched with other people using the criteria you provide.
Third-party matchmaking services find the best matches for you on these sites and then lets you hand pick who you want to get in touch with. This way you can remain hidden from all the unnecessary folk on these sites.
About Owen Cashner
Owen Cashner considers himself a professional dater and amateur comedian. His passion for writing led him to document his experiences using online dating websites. All opinions expressed on this website are to further educate men on the landscape of dating. Use this information to your advantage and conquer the dating world.
Follow Us!