How to hide your VKontakte friends (or view other people's friends)

2022-10-30

Step-by-step instructions on how to use the function "Hidden friends" in VKontakte; how to find out which of your friends have hidden you in your personal list and how to count the number of secret contacts in someone else's profile page.

Content table :

Why use the function "Hidden friends"

You may have already tried it. In short, it is useful to "hide" contacts, including virtual friends, by removing them from the public list with their respective name.

Why hide contacts? The question is an individual one. Here are some reasons:

Someone does not want to advertise a friendship,
someone prefers not to remove friends but simply hides them,
for security reasons it is necessary to remove a friend from the public list urgently without actually deleting him.

The advantage of hiding is that your friend will know that you are in his list, even if he is not in the friend section. There is no need for outright deletion, which simply could be considered inappropriate.

See also Who visited my VKontakte page?

Spoiler: many hidden friend detection services do not work

We want to debunk the myth that hidden friend detection services work without problems.

In the past these sites really worked, honestly showing the contacts that were hidden by a particular user. Nowadays the maximum that such sites are good for is to find out how many friends exactly were hidden. But it is clear that this information is of no use. In addition, such spy sites may pose a threat to your VKontakte account, especially if they require authorized access to the profile functions.

There are, however, resilient services to identify hidden friends. We have tested some of them and of them we can recommend this one - 220vk.com.

How to find hidden friends through this site:

Go to the 220vk.com page.
In the text field, type the link to your profile.
Click the "Scan" button.

In some cases you will need to activate the online monitoring to track the changes. You are asked to do this after entering the link of the profile and pressing the button "Scan".

Note . For the moment 220vk.com works correctly and opens in your browser, but soon the service may be blocked by Roskomnadzor. Therefore, if at the time of reading this article it will not work, use VPN or site mirrors, if any.

See also : Find out your VKontakte page registration date

Can you find out exactly how many friends are hidden?

Luckily, it is possible to find out without using various cunning services how many contacts / friends have been hidden in VKontakte from other users eyes. By the way, this method was found on lifehacker.ru, thanks to them.

Disadvantages of this approach:

In addition to the number of people, this method will not help to identify the names and surnames of hidden friends.
The counting method is inaccurate and does not take into account blocked VKontakte users as well as "frozen" and deactivated users.

How to count number of hidden friends on your own:

Go to the Friends section of the profile page you wish to know the stats for.
Open the "Preferences" menu.
In the menu, activate the filter "Gender" and choose "Male".
Sign the number of friends found.
Simply do the same for Females.
Compose the two resulting digits (M + W), then subtract this number from your total number of friends (displayed as "All friends" if you remove the filters).
This way you will obtain the number of users not found in the public friends list.

How to hide your friends in VKontakte public list

It is strange, but the possibility to hide friends is not so obvious, you will not find it immediately ("scientific guess").

Here is a simple instruction:

Click your profile picture at the top right or follow the link.
Go to Settings > Privacy.
In the column "Who is visible in my friends and followers list", click on "Everyone except".
Select the people you want to remove from the public list.
Click the "Save changes" button.
After the above steps, you may check how the list looks to other VKontakte members by clicking on the link "see how other members see your page" at the bottom of the page.