Harness Facebook’s Creepiest Feature

by Michael Sitver · Published October 18 · Updated October 18

Facebook-stalking. It’s become a term for thoroughly tracking someone on Facebook. But did you ever think you could see who was doing it to you? Creepily enough, you can.

I discovered the method below here, and verified it this morning with my own facebook profile:

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STEP #1. Sign into your Facebook profile

STEP #2. Right click anywhere on the page and choose “View Page Source”

STEP #3. Press control (Command on Mac) and the F key, and search for “initialchatfriendlist” in the source code.

STEP #4. Below that will be an array, with a list of numbers ending in -[a number]. Some samples numbers might be 33709269-2 or 1331730213-2. Take only the section before the dash, and copy it “33709269”. These numbers represent facebook user ideas.

STEP #6. Type in facebook.com/ into your browser and paste that number beside it. It will look something like http://www.facebook.com/33709269.

STEP #7.Your stalker is revealed.

Follow @tascomatic

You can keep going down the list to see your second biggest stalker, your third biggest stalker and on and on and on and on….

While it’s creepy enough to see who views your profile the most, it’s particularly creepy to know that facebook tracks this data, and keeps it so publicly available. I’m not someone who obsesses over privacy, but I might just have to pay a visit to my settings page.