How To: Stop Your TikTok Account from Being Suggested to Contacts, Facebook Friends & Other Users You May Know

Your TikTok videos might be interesting, creative, fun, and appealing, but that doesn't necessarily mean you want the entire world to see them. While you're fine with strangers watching your videos, you may not want your close friends, family, and coworkers to see the kinds of mischief you're up to.

When on someone's TikTok profile, tap the down arrow next to "Follow," and you'll see several suggested TikTok users based on your interests. When you follow an account, these suggestions appear automatically. If there are more recommendations available than just the ones you can swipe through, you could also hit "See all."

Although most of the suggestions that appear on the sidescrolling and vertical lists are celebrities, popular creators, and accounts that are very much like the current profile you're viewing, you'll also get suggestions based on your contacts.

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That means you may see your real-life family, friends, coworkers, classmates, teachers, boss, and other people you know you the physical world as account suggestions. It could be because you synced your contacts with TikTok or connected your Facebook account. You could even see account suggestions for users that are followers of accounts you follow or are in your contacts.

Fortunately, you can easily hide your TikTok account from being suggested to other users, which is great if you don't want any "locals" to find it.

To start, open the official TikTok app on your iPhone or Android phone and tap on "Me" in the navigation bar to head to your profile. Next, tap on the horizontal or vertical ellipses in the top right to view the settings menu. Tap on "Privacy" near the top of the page, in the Account section.

By default, "Suggest your account to others" will be toggled on, so your account may be suggested to family, friends, and other people you may know in person. To stop your account from being suggested, simply toggle the switch off.

If you're interested in growing your TikTok account, this feature should stay enabled because it will put your account in front of more eyes. If you don't care about that, then keep it off so that people you know IRL have a harder time finding your account. They may still stumble up it, but this will at least make it harder for them.