Privacy

Who can see what you save on Pinterest, setting by setting

Published 3 October 2026 · Lucas Viegas · 6 min read

If your profile is public, anyone can see the Pins you save to public boards, on your profile and in Pinterest search. Private boards, a private profile and search privacy each narrow that, and each one narrows something different.

This post is about saves, activity and what reaches a feed, not about the secret versus public switch itself, which has its own post on what public actually exposes. Every label below is Pinterest’s own, read on 7 September 2026.

What does a visitor actually see on your profile?

Pinterest describes your profile as the place to find all the Pins you save, the boards you create and the Pins you try, next to your profile photo, name, bio and optionally your location. It adds that on your profile you can also see who is following you and the boards, topics and people you follow, and then the line that matters here: anyone can see your profile, but only you can see your secret boards when you view your own profile.

The privacy policy says the same thing in blunter language: anyone can see the public content you post, such as boards and Pins you create and public profile information you give us, and, depending on where you live, Pinterest makes that public information available through APIs. Saving is publishing, unless you have told it otherwise.

Who can see what you save, row by row?

One row per thing you might save or do. Where a cell says not documented, the help centre has no answer, which is a real finding rather than a gap in the research.

Who can see each kind of Pinterest save, activity and board tab
What you saved or did	You	Followers and invited people	Anyone on Pinterest	Search engines
Pins you save to a public board	Yes	Yes	Yes, on your profile and in Pinterest search	May appear, unless search privacy is on
Pins you save to a private board	Yes	Only the collaborators you invite	No	No
Pins on a board you archived	Yes, at the end of your boards	Not documented	No, archived boards do not show in your public profile	Not documented
The boards, topics and people you follow	Yes, on your own profile	Yes, Pinterest names people they follow among the activity you see	Anyone can see your profile; no separate control is documented	Not documented
Your follower list	Yes, under Followers	Not documented	Not documented	Not documented
Comments you leave on a Pin	Yes	Yes	Yes. Pinterest says the comments you leave can be viewed by other people	Not documented
The More ideas and Shop tabs on your board	Yes, owner only	No	No, even when the board is public	No
Home feed suggestions drawn from your private boards	Yes, only you	No	No	No
Everything, with Private profile turned on	Yes	Only the people you invite to follow you	No, and you cannot be found in Pinterest search	No, search privacy is turned on automatically

Does the person you saved from find out?

Pinterest answers this only for the private case, and answers it precisely: when you save Pins to a private board, the person you saved from will not get a notification and the Pin’s count will not increase. It goes one step further and says that when you save Pins from a private board, it will not show the name of the person you saved it from on your new Pin.

For a save to a public board there is no matching sentence anywhere. What does exist is a notification category called Saves, offered for both email and push, alongside Comments, Mentions and Tries. That is strong circumstantial evidence and nothing more, so this post will not claim more than Pinterest writes down: the private case is documented, the public case is implied by a settings list.

Do your saves show up in other people’s feeds?

Partly, and Pinterest describes it from the reader’s side rather than yours. The home feed, in its words, is where you discover Pins from people and boards you follow, plus Pins picked for you based on the people you follow, the boards you create, the Pins you engage with and the things you search for. Nothing there promises a stranger will meet your saves; the documented public route is search, because public boards are visible on your profile and in search.

The sharpest statement is buried in the notification settings, under See activity from other people: it controls whether you see activity from your Facebook friends and the people you follow, and Pinterest says that activity includes things like Pins they have seen, people they follow and boards they have created. Read from the other end, your new boards and your follows are the kind of thing that can surface to people who follow you. The switch belongs to the reader, though, not to you, and Pinterest never frames it as a disclosure setting.

Your own feed is the part you can steer directly. Pinterest says it recommends Pins to you based on your saves, searches and browsing activity, and Refine your recommendations is where you edit that, tab by tab. If you would rather change who is feeding you than what you feed back, the post on following a board versus a profile covers the other half.

How do you change who sees your saves?

Four different scopes, in rough order of how much they hide. Nothing here is retroactive.

1Make one board private: open it, click the ellipsis icon at the right of the screen, click Edit info and settings, scroll down, toggle Make this board private and click Done. In the apps the menu item is Edit board and header image, or Edit info and settings.
2Or start the next one private: when you name a new board, toggle Keep this board secret on the web or Make this board secret in the apps. Pinterest’s private boards article calls the same toggle Keep this board private, so expect either word.
3Ask search engines to look away: in Settings, open Profile visibility, toggle Search privacy, click I understand and Save. You must be at least 18. Pinterest adds the tag right away, warns that information already in search results may remain, and points you to Google, Bing or Yahoo to request removal.
4Or hide the whole profile: same screen, toggle Private profile. Private profiles do not appear in Pinterest search results or in search engines, and search privacy is then turned on for you and cannot be edited. Business accounts have to become personal accounts first.
5Invite the people you do want: open your profile, click Share, then Copy link. Pinterest says each link expires after three days, or after five people use it.
6Trim what your saves feed back to you: in Settings, open Refine your recommendations and work through the Boards, Interests, Following and Activity or Pins tabs. Recommendations are already off for archived and secret boards, which carry a lock, and turning them off does not change the ads you see.

What does Pinterest not document?

Whether a visitor to a public profile can open your follower and following lists, or only you can. Whether a save to a public board notifies the original pinner, as opposed to the private case, which is spelled out. Whether comments you leave are indexed by search engines along with the Pin. Whether an archived board is still reachable by anyone holding a direct link, given that Pinterest only says it will not show up in your public profile. And how long a removal request takes at Google, Bing or Yahoo, which Pinterest sensibly leaves to them.

One related case is documented, and it is a useful one: blocking. Pinterest says a block stops someone following you, messaging you or interacting with your Pins, that their Pins leave your home feed although they may still appear in search results and group boards, and that Pins you have already saved from them stay on your profile. Nobody is told they were blocked. If the shared surface in question is a group board, the collaborator rules are their own subject.

What this means if a board is doing a job outside Pinterest

The same setting that decides who sees your saves decides whether anything else can read them. VisionWall is a macOS menu-bar app that turns any public Pinterest board into a live, rotating desktop wallpaper: you give it the board’s URL, it needs no Pinterest account, new pins appear automatically, and the masonry composition is reshuffled on each refresh, every 30 minutes by default and anywhere from 2 minutes to 2 hours. It can only read a public board, so visibility is not a detail for it, it is the whole question: a private board, or a board behind a private profile, is unreadable to it exactly as it is to a stranger. The tidy answer is a second, public board holding only the images you are happy to publish, which is what making a Pinterest board public walks through. $9.99 once, on macOS 13.3 (Ventura) or later.

Get VisionWall · $9.99 once How to make a Pinterest board public

Questions people ask about who sees their Pinterest saves

Are Pinterest saves private?

Not by default. Pinterest describes public boards as visible on your profile and in search, and its privacy policy says anyone can see the public content you post, such as boards and Pins you create and public profile information you give us. Saves become private only on a private board, or behind a private profile.

Who can see my Pins if my profile is public?

Anyone who opens your profile, which Pinterest says holds all the Pins you save, the boards you create and the Pins you try. The one exception it names is your own view: only you can see your secret boards when you look at your own profile. Pinterest search can surface public boards, and search engines can too until you turn on search privacy.

Does Pinterest tell someone when I save their Pin?

For private boards Pinterest is explicit that it does not: the person you saved from will not get a notification and the Pin’s count will not increase, and your new Pin will not show their name. For a save to a public board it never states the opposite outright. The closest documented thing is a Saves notification category, offered for both email and push.

Does search privacy hide my boards inside Pinterest?

No. Search privacy adds a tag to your pages asking search engines to exclude your profile and boards, and Pinterest warns that information already in search results may still be there, with removal to be requested from Google, Bing or Yahoo directly. Inside Pinterest the board stays public. You must be at least 18 to change the setting, and on a private profile it is turned on for you and cannot be edited.

Are teen accounts different?

Yes. Pinterest sets personal profiles for 13 to 15 year olds to private, and 16 to 17 year olds to private by default with the option to go public; you must be 16 or over to edit profile visibility. Under 18 the profile is private, which Pinterest describes as your activity on Pinterest being hidden, and under 16 the boards and Pins you create are visible only to you and the people you invited to follow you.

Can an app read the Pins I save?

Only the public ones. Pinterest’s privacy policy says anyone can see the public content you post and that, depending on where you live, it makes this public information available through APIs. An app that never signs in as you sees exactly what a logged-out visitor sees, so a private board is out of reach for it as much as for a stranger.

Which Pinterest pages were checked for this post?

All read on 7 September 2026.