How to hide friends in VK: procedure on phone and computer

Why do users hide their friends?

The reasons for a user wanting to hide some people from prying eyes may be different. In my opinion, most often such a decision is associated with some personal motives and considerations. Let's look at some of them:

An attempt to protect yourself from fraudulent activities. Through a social network, you can find out a lot of private information about the user: from place of work to phone number and residential address. This can also be done through the pages of relatives or colleagues. Moreover, their albums may contain photos of you together, which other users do not need to see. After hiding such friends, it will be more difficult for attackers to collect more information about you.
Some of the friends are on bad terms with each other, but the user continues to communicate with both. In order not to offend any of them, the latter decides to use the hiding function.
Reluctance to “light up” your second fake page. Often people have not one VKontakte account, but several. At the same time, they add all their profiles as friends for convenience. There is no need for others to know about this fact.
Sometimes there is intrigue. Attempts to lead a double life, unfortunately, are not uncommon in our time.
There is a possibility that someone will want to send unpleasant messages or compromising files to your friends. In this situation, your reputation can suffer greatly. Therefore, many find it useful to protect themselves from such actions by prudently hiding the pages of loved ones from their friends list.
A simple reluctance to share information about friendly relations with certain people. There are situations when among friends or relatives there is a person who does not have a very good reputation in society. And when a friend request comes in, it seems rude to reject it.
Some people are quite secretive, so they try to indicate a minimum of information on VK. Including close friends.

Whatever the reason for hiding users, a person can do so at any time they wish. Fortunately, this process is quite simple and does not take much time.

Why hide friends in VK on iPhone

Users explain their desire to hide information for strangers visiting their personal page in different ways. Common reasons include:

jealousy of the partner and his negative attitude towards people of the opposite sex;
reluctance to talk about your place of work and colleagues;
attempts to maintain confidentiality - not all people like to show off their lives, although they register on social networks.

How to hide contacts in VK

If desired, anyone who visits the page can obtain information about the names of loved ones, place of study or work, passions and hobbies. Not everyone wants their personal things to become public knowledge. In some cases, relevant information may fall into the hands of unscrupulous friends who will start sending spam and offensive letters to the entire list of friends.

Users consider clone pages to be serious problems, into which everyone in their contacts is copied. Attackers do not disdain personal photographs, presenting their victims as grateful customers or admiring followers.

The weaknesses of hiding your friends list include certain facts:

One-sided hiding - secret information is not reflected on the user’s page, but remains visible on friends’ pages. Exposure is a matter of a few minutes spent.
Creating another profile may cause all “erased” contacts to appear in it. This problem occurs when the settings are incorrectly selected. Her solution is to set an item that confirms that only the account owner can see hidden contacts.
Negative attitudes of individual friends. To prevent the right people from finding out about the secret, they must be allowed to see all secret contacts.

Important! Every VK user has the right to privacy. The final choice remains with the owner of the page on the social network.

Maximum number of hidden friends

Hide friends from prying eyes via computer

By default, VK has settings that allow anyone who visits your page to see a list of all friends. To fix the situation and hide some users from prying eyes, do the following:

Log in to your VKontakte account. If for some reason you were unable to log in, use the tips from the article on our website about the most common problems with authorization in VK.
In the upper right corner, click on the arrow (highlighted in red in the screenshot) located next to your profile photo, and in the window that appears, select Settings.
Go to the Privacy tab.
In the “My Page” section, find the item “Who is visible in the list of my friends and subscriptions” and click on the inscription “All friends” located next to it.
After this, a list of all users who are your friends will appear. Check the boxes next to the people you want to hide. For convenience, use the search bar.
Click on the "Save Changes" button at the bottom of the page.

After these steps, you will no longer be able to find the hidden user in your friends list. However, on this person's page, your friendship with you can be tracked. Ask him to do the same and hide you. Only in this case no one will guess about your relationship.

How to hide your subscribers in the web version of Vkontakte

As many have already guessed, in the mobile phone method we used the settings from the full version of the VKontakte website.

If you want to hide your friends in the web version, then your steps will be approximately the same:

Select an avatar at the top right next to your name and click the “Settings” button;
Then select “Privacy” from the settings block;
On the left, find the option “Who sees my friends” and select the link on the right;
The next list will display all your friends, opposite whom you can check, adding them to hidden;
Immediately below this item is the line “Who sees hidden friends.” Make sure it is set to "Only Me".

After this, no one will see your hidden friends except you.

How to hide friends via phone

Using a phone, performing a similar procedure is even easier than on a computer. It is noteworthy that it will not be possible to hide VKontakte friends through a mobile application for an iPhone or Android smartphone. However, there is still a solution: launch the desktop version of the site and follow all the same steps described in the paragraph above. There is an easier way to do this - through the mobile version of the site.

So, to hide a friend on VK via phone, follow these steps:

Launch your browser and go to the VKontakte website.
Click on the three horizontal blue bars located in the lower right corner of the screen.
Go to Settings by clicking on the gear icon at the top of the page.
In the menu that appears, select “Privacy”.
Scroll down and stop at the column “Who is visible in the list of my friends and subscriptions.” By clicking on it once, select the users you want to hide.
To save changes, click on the blue check mark at the top of the screen.

The result will be exactly the same as in the previous paragraph. To exclude a person from the list of hidden friends, simply uncheck the box in paragraph 5.

A way to hide friends in the mobile version of VKontakte via a smartphone

You can hide your friends on VK no matter what OS your phone has. This can be done even on proprietary firmware of the phone (without OS). Your official client for the mobile version of VK does not allow you to access the settings, as in the web version. Therefore, open any browser on your phone and go to the following address: https://m.vk.com/. This is the mobile version of the site, the settings that we need will be available here. Log in and find the button responsible for the settings. Usually it looks like three horizontal stripes. Perhaps you want to remove possible VK friends from your feed - find out what you can do.

Procedure:

Open the “Privacy” section;
Scroll down this page and click on the “Full version” item;
Next, you need to find the item “Which friends are visible...”. Select it; Set the visibility settings for your friends on VK
A list of friends will be displayed. Select who you want to hide.

This way you will create a list of your hidden friends. But remember that it is not endless. Any VK profile has a limit. You can only add 30 people. After which you will need to delete one friend in order to add a new one here. Therefore, it must be used expediently. The browser does not matter in our case. You can find it in the Google Chrome or UC Browser market. The built-in one, which was already in the system when purchased, is also suitable.

This instruction is suitable for both Android, iPhone and iOS devices. In the mobile version, you need to save settings, unlike the VK website. You also have the opportunity to make messages unread in VK.

How to reveal hidden users to other people

VKontakte allows you not only to hide your friends from prying eyes, but also to select several people who will be able to see your secret friendship. This can be done both on a computer and through an application on a mobile phone. To do this, follow these steps:

Open settings and click on “Privacy”.
In the “My Page” section, select the “Who sees my hidden friends” column.
The program will offer one of four options to choose from: “All friends”, “Only me”, “Hidden friends” and “Some friends”.

By selecting the latter option, you can manually add specific people or lists of users who will be allowed or denied access to view your hidden friends.

Features of privacy settings in VK that you should know

It would seem that everything is simple - hidden persons are protected by privacy settings that are almost impossible to bypass. But what do we know about other social networking options? Likes, reposts, gifts, posts on the wall and comments on them - all this can be done by the user you have hidden. Will any other user see this? Yes! Your photos with people tagged may also be useful to someone.

Therefore, you should also remember about such privacy settings as “Who can see photos of me,” “Who can see posts on my wall,” and “Who can see comments on posts on my wall”

“Tags in photos” – here we disable the “Recognize me in photos” and “Recognize friends in my photos” functions.

As for posts on the wall, it’s better to select the “Only friends” option in all positions - they can leave posts, they can see them, they can comment and see comments.

Definitely about - “Only me.” Not many people can boast of having funny friends, but sometimes it’s not funny.

Well, an example from life: you are communicating with an old friend about whom it is better for your wife not to know, so you hid her in your friends list. Your friend must know about this so as not to screw up both of them. She should also hide you on her page. Your profile should not be in the list of your friend’s profiles, and in the privacy settings of both, in the “Who can see your hidden friends” item, select “Only me.” Thus, the wife will not be able to determine your relationship in any way. Your friend's friends won't see you as her friend, and your friends won't be able to find your friend on your list.

Will my friends find out that I hid them?

Once you have added your friend to the “secret” list, he will not receive any notifications or messages about this. However, there is still a way to determine whether you have hidden a user from your friends list. And this, in my opinion, is the biggest disadvantage of this function. After all, you must admit, finding out that a person for some reason is hiding his friendship with you is not very pleasant.

You can check this through the profile of any other VK user. To do this, just go to the page of a friend and try to find your last name or first name in the list of friends. If he is hiding you, the search will not yield results.

Few people would think of checking their friends using this principle. But still, the fact of concealment can be declassified by experienced users or by chance. There is still a possibility, although it is small.

How to show invisible friends to some users?

You have the opportunity to specify who will be able to see your hidden friends. To do this, you need to select the “Who sees my hidden friends” setting. There are several points here:

Only me – users will be visible only to you.
Only friends - users will be visible to all your friends. Only those visitors who are not on the list will not see them.
Friends and their friends - all users will be visible to your friends and their friends.
Hidden – To prevent hidden users from realizing that you are hiding them, you can enable this setting. Then they will see themselves on the list.
Some - here you can specify those to whom hidden users will be visible.
Some lists - here you can select one or more private or public lists of friends who should have access to this information.

Why does VK allow you to hide only a certain number of friends?

Previously, the VKontakte social network allowed you to hide all friends from your list with a few clicks of the mouse. Now there is no such option, since the developers decided that this function creates problems with communication and interferes with making new acquaintances. After which they reduced the maximum number of hidden pages to 15. Then they decided to slightly increase this value. Currently, in VK it is possible to hide no more than 30 users from the friends list. Not that much, but still.

How to hide more than 30 friends on VK

The desire to remove a large number of contacts from prying eyes is limited by the functionality of the program. But experts found a way out of the situation: a weak point in the utility allows one to bypass this threshold. The technique is simple, but it doesn’t always work. Some users complain that the trick did not work in their case.

The operation is carried out in stages, according to the following algorithm:

After visiting your own page on a social network, you need to move to the “Friends” subsection.
To open the command window, press the “Ctrl+Shift+I” keys.
There, open the “Console” sub-item and write down the special code: function adder(user,list,add,st) { var o = user; o[6] = parseInt(o[6]); add? (o[6] & 1 << list || (o[6] += 1 << list)) : (o[6] & 1 << list && (o[6] -= 1 << list)) ; setTimeout(function () { ajax.post("al_friends.php", { act: "save_cats", uid: user[0], cats: o[6], hash: cur.userHash }, { onDone: function() { var el=document.querySelector(“.left_label.inl_bl”); el.innerHTML=el.innerHTML>=1?(el.innerHTML-0)+1:1; } }); },st||0) ; } function itr(list,add){ function fn(start){ for(var i=start||0,len=cur.friendsList.all.length;i++){ adder(cur.friendsList.all ,list,add, i*50); } } fn(); };
The code can be copied and entered into the browser field, and then confirm the action by pressing the “Enter” key.
In the operation window you need to enter “itr(30, true)” and click on “Enter” again.

In the title of the “My Page” section (located on the left side) the number of hidden contacts should appear, not the inscription. After all changes, the account is updated. This approach allows you to close more than 100 people, despite the fact that in most cases there is no point in this.

VK page settings

To hide a recently acquired or old acquaintance from other subscribers, it is enough to correctly configure privacy in VK. Changes are made in a special subsection and do not require much effort. The main thing is not to leave your profile open so that others do not expose your forced cunning.

Is it possible to hide friends through privacy settings?

However, the ability to hide only 30 friends did not satisfy all users. This is not surprising, especially considering that almost everyone has more than several hundred friends. Many people consider information about their friends private and do not want to expose it to the entire Internet. It’s one thing when your friends are seen by people whom you know and have personally added as friends, and quite another thing when strangers visit the page.

In this case, changing the privacy settings will solve the problem, in particular changing the profile type from “open” to “private”. This option is suitable for people who do not want to show detailed information from their page to unfamiliar users. This is very easy to do using a computer, a mobile version of the site in a browser, or an application.

So, to close your profile from prying eyes, follow these steps:

Go to your VKontakte page and open Settings.
Select Privacy.
Scroll down the page to the bottom and in the “Other” section, find the “Profile Type” column. Change it to private as shown in the screenshot above.
Confirm your action by clicking the “Yes, close” button in the window that appears.

Now the basic information of your profile will be displayed only for users added as friends. At the same time, you can always see how any other visitors see your page. This feature is available in the same privacy settings at the very bottom of the page.

After these steps, only the following information will be available to unfamiliar visitors:

Photo on the avatar (without the possibility of enlarging it).
Your last name and first name.
Number of friends and posts on the page.
List of mutual friends (if any).
Status in the profile, date of birth, city, place of study and work (provided that these data are indicated on the page).

What else can I do to prevent others from seeing my friends?

If you do not want the list of your friends to be seen on VK, you can block information on your page from being viewed. In this case, only your friends will have access to your profile.

Make your page private and add only friends you trust:

Click on the thumbnail icon of your avatar and select “Settings”;
Then click on the “Privacy” item and lower the page to the very bottom of the settings items;
Find the line “Profile type” and click on it;
Select "Private".

Thus, we have looked at how you can hide your friends in the VK application on your phone. These privacy settings are almost impossible to bypass. The new version of the social network has eliminated many vulnerabilities that previously made prohibited functions available. You can trust the settings as long as you haven't crossed the path of a competent hacker.

I'll tell you how you can hide VK friends from other users. If you want, your friends won't even know that you hid them. Everything is done through the VKontakte privacy settings.

There is a limitation that does not allow you to hide more than 30 friends. Previously, there was a bug that allowed you to bypass this VK restriction, but it was closed. Therefore, you will have to be content with what you have.

Attention! If you hid a friend, but he didn’t hide you, then on his VK page you will still be on his list of friends. If you want complete privacy, then ask a friend to do the same.

How to hide an application on an Android phone - hide program icons

Alternative method (add to bookmarks)

Another good way to hide a person you know from prying eyes is to add his page to your favorites, without adding him as a friend. Thus, the necessary page will always be at hand, and other users will not even realize that you know each other. This method has one important advantage. It allows you to communicate with your “chosen” person without fear that your online presence together will be noticed and tracked by strangers. The algorithm of actions here is extremely simple:

Go to the page of the selected user.
Below your profile photo, find the gray button with an ellipsis and click on it.
In the menu that appears, click on the “Save to bookmarks” item.
By clicking on the “Notify about posts” inscription, you can set up pop-up messages about updates from the “favorite” user (provided that his profile is open).
Now the selected person will be available in the bookmarks, which are located on the left menu panel.
If you do not have such a section, select the “General” column in the settings and click the “Customize display of menu items” button.

Checking the result

After all the steps have been completed, the user wants to understand whether he did everything correctly. To do this, you need to check the result following the instructions:

go to your VKontakte profile;
go to the “Settings” section, then select the “Privacy” line;
Scroll to the bottom of the page and find the clickable line “See how other users see the page.”
By clicking on it, the profile owner will be able to see how his page looks to other visitors, and also check whether some of his friends are hidden.

VKontakte also allows its users to choose who can see the list of secret friends. The user can independently decide whether to open the full list to all visitors or see hidden friends only for himself. You can grant or deny access through the privacy settings in the “Who sees my hidden friends” section.

Thanks to easy profile settings, users can control the level of openness of their page and make certain data private. Unfortunately, not all information can be hidden from prying eyes. In our article, we provided safe ways to hide friends and subscribers on VKontakte.

The maximum list of secret friends is 30 people, which is usually enough for the average user who wants to hide some people from their social circle. As for other methods (special programs and services), they have absolutely no guarantee of effectiveness, but at the same time they carry a high risk of encountering scammers or infecting your computer with viruses. Whether it is worth the risk for an uncertain result, the user decides for himself.

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