LinkedIn is a professional network, but it holds more personal data than most people realize. Your birthday sits at an awkward intersection: it feels harmless when you add it, but once it is visible to your connections or the public, you lose control over who sees it, what they infer from it, and how it gets used. Some people discover this during a job search when they realize recruiters can calculate their age from it. Others figure it out when clients they barely know start sending birthday messages. A smaller group learns the hard way that birthday data is a standard piece of information phishing attacks rely on.<\/p>\n
Hiding your birthday on LinkedIn takes under two minutes if you know where to go. The problem is that the setting is buried, the visibility options are not clearly explained, and most guides stop before they answer the obvious follow-up questions. This one does not. You will find step-by-step instructions for both desktop and mobile, a clear explanation of the difference between hiding your birthday and deleting it entirely, and a full breakdown of what changes after you flip the setting.<\/p>\n
Most people added their birthday to LinkedIn during signup without thinking twice. LinkedIn prompts for it, the field looks routine, and the default visibility setting is not “only you.” Before covering the steps to change it, it is worth being clear about what you are actually protecting yourself from.<\/p>\n
Age discrimination in hiring is prohibited under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) in the United States for workers over 40, and similar protections exist in the UK, EU, Canada, and Australia. The law prohibits discrimination. It does not prevent someone from doing the math.<\/p>\n
When your birthday is visible on your LinkedIn profile, anyone viewing it knows your exact age. Recruiters screening candidates can filter mentally (or algorithmically) based on that number before they ever consider your experience. A 2022 study published in the\u00a0Journal of Applied Psychology<\/em>\u00a0found that age-based bias in hiring decisions begins to affect callback rates for candidates over 35, even when qualifications are comparable.<\/p>\n Hiding your birthday removes that data point. Recruiters cannot calculate an age they cannot see.<\/p>\n Your LinkedIn profile is one of the most publicly accessible documents about your professional life. It includes your full name, current and past employers, job titles, education, location, and often your general industry. Add a visible birthday to that, and you have handed over enough personally identifiable information for a reasonably skilled attacker to:<\/p>\n The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) consistently ranks social engineering as one of the top vectors for identity theft and business email compromise. LinkedIn profiles are a primary research tool for attackers running targeted campaigns. Birthday visibility is a small but real part of that exposure.<\/p>\n When your birthday is visible and set to “Your connections,” LinkedIn sends notifications to people in your network encouraging them to wish you a happy birthday. This sounds benign until you consider who is in your LinkedIn network.<\/p>\n Most people’s LinkedIn connections include current colleagues, former managers, clients, prospects, vendors, and people they met at a conference five years ago. A birthday notification goes to all of them. For people doing high-volume networking or LinkedIn outreach, that can mean hundreds of near-strangers getting a nudge to message you about something personal. It positions you differently than you might want to be positioned in a professional context.<\/p>\n Sales reps and recruiters who use LinkedIn heavily have reported that birthday notifications can create awkward interactions with prospects and clients, particularly when the relationship is still early or transactional. Hiding your birthday turns that notification off entirely.<\/p>\n LinkedIn uses profile data to power its internal personalization and notification systems. Your birthday, even if set to “Only you,” still sits in LinkedIn’s database and contributes to their data model of your account. When the birthday is visible to connections or the public, it also becomes part of how LinkedIn segments you for their own advertising and content targeting systems.<\/p>\n LinkedIn’s own privacy policy, last updated in 2024, confirms that personal information including date of birth is used “to provide, personalize, and develop our Services” and “for advertising.” Removing birthday visibility does not remove the data from LinkedIn’s back-end systems, but it stops it from being used to show your age to other users and stops birthday-related ad targeting tied to your network’s visibility of that date.<\/p>\n The setting is inside your profile’s edit view, not in LinkedIn’s main privacy settings panel. That is why most people cannot find it on their first try.<\/p>\n Steps to hide your birthday on LinkedIn desktop:<\/strong><\/p>\n What each visibility option actually means:<\/strong><\/p>\n The mobile app layout is different from the desktop version. The edit path is shorter in some ways and more confusing in others because the “Personal information” section is not labeled the same way.<\/p>\n Steps to hide your birthday on LinkedIn (iOS and Android):<\/strong><\/p>\n Note on iOS vs. Android differences:<\/strong><\/p>\n On iOS, the visibility selector appears directly below the birthday date fields. On Android, it may appear as a separate line below the date, labeled “Who can see your birthday.” The functional options are identical across both platforms. If you updated the LinkedIn app recently and the UI looks different from this description, the setting is still in the “Edit intro” section of your profile, but the exact label may have shifted slightly between app versions.<\/p>\n Setting your birthday to “Only you” and deleting the birthday field entirely are not the same thing, and the distinction matters depending on how seriously you want to reduce your data exposure.<\/p>\n When you change the visibility to “Only you,” the date remains stored in LinkedIn’s database. LinkedIn still holds that data and uses it internally for personalization, ad targeting based on age cohorts, and platform analytics. What changes is the external-facing behavior: no other user can see your birthday, and LinkedIn stops sending birthday notifications to your network.<\/p>\n This is the right option for someone who wants to stop the social awkwardness of birthday notifications and prevent casual viewers from seeing their age, without worrying too much about what LinkedIn does with the data on its back end.<\/p>\n Deleting your birthday removes the date from the visible field and stops LinkedIn from surfacing it in any user-facing context. It also removes one layer of LinkedIn’s ability to use that data for age-based ad targeting and birthday-triggered notifications. To delete it, go through the same edit steps above, clear the birth month and year fields, and save.<\/p>\n LinkedIn’s privacy documentation notes that users can request full deletion of personal data under applicable regulations including GDPR and CCPA, but clearing the field in the app does not necessarily trigger a full back-end purge. If full data removal is your goal, you would need to submit a formal data deletion request through LinkedIn’s privacy settings, under “Data privacy” and “Get a copy of your data” or “Delete account.”<\/p>\n Changing a privacy setting on LinkedIn rarely comes with a clear explanation of what actually changes. Here is a direct answer to every reasonable question someone would have after hiding their birthday.<\/p>\n No. When your birthday visibility is set to “Only you,” LinkedIn stops sending birthday notifications to your network entirely. Connections will not receive a prompt to message you on your birthday.<\/p>\n Yes, if they saw it before you changed the setting. LinkedIn cannot erase information that someone has already viewed. Changing visibility stops future exposure but does not retroactively affect what people have already seen. In practice, most LinkedIn users do not make note of birthdays they see on the platform, so this is rarely a practical concern.<\/p>\n LinkedIn’s Social Selling Index (SSI) measures four dimensions: establishing your professional brand, finding the right people, engaging with insights, and building relationships. Birthday visibility is not a scored component of SSI. Your profile completeness indicator in LinkedIn’s own dashboard may show a slightly lower percentage if birthday is counted as an empty field, but this has no effect on how your profile ranks in search or how recruiters find you.<\/p>\n No. LinkedIn Premium does not grant access to data that is set to “Only you.” Premium features include expanded search filters, InMail credits, profile view data, and LinkedIn Learning access. They do not override another user’s privacy settings.<\/p>\n Yes, to a degree. LinkedIn’s advertising platform allows advertisers to target by age range, and this targeting draws on the birth year stored in your account. Hiding your birthday from other users does not automatically opt you out of LinkedIn’s own internal age-based ad targeting. To reduce ad personalization, you would need to go to LinkedIn’s “Advertising data” settings under Privacy and Security and adjust those controls separately.<\/p>\n No. Recruiter search filters on LinkedIn do not include age or birthday as a searchable field (LinkedIn’s own policies prohibit age as a filter). Hiding your birthday does not affect your visibility in recruiter search results. It does remove the data point that would allow someone to manually calculate your age after landing on your profile.<\/p>\n Hiding your birthday is a sensible first step, but if privacy is the actual goal, the birthday field is not the most consequential setting on your profile. Several other default settings expose more sensitive information and get far less attention.<\/p>\n By default, your first-degree connections can see your full connections list. That means any competitor, prospect, or recruiter connected to you can browse every person you are connected to. For sales reps, this is a material business risk. A competitor can look at your connections and identify which accounts you are working. A prospect can see who else you know and use that to triangulate information before a call.<\/p>\n To change this, go to: Settings and Privacy, then Visibility, then “Connections.” Set it to “Only you.” This is one of the highest-impact LinkedIn privacy settings most users have never touched.<\/p>\n LinkedIn lets you browse other profiles in private mode, which means the profile owner sees “Someone viewed your profile” rather than your name. However, private mode is off by default, and using it comes with a trade-off: when you browse privately, you also lose the ability to see who views your own profile.<\/p>\n The three options are:<\/p>\n Recruiters and hiring managers often use private mode when screening candidates. If you are actively job searching, staying in standard mode can be useful because profile views from relevant companies can be a signal. If you are not job searching, private mode costs nothing.<\/p>\n Every like, comment, and follow on LinkedIn is potentially visible to your connections. If you are researching a competitor, evaluating a new vendor, or engaging with content in a niche you are not publicly associated with, your activity feed can reveal more than you intend.<\/p>\n LinkedIn allows you to control this under: Settings and Privacy, then Visibility, then “Visibility of your LinkedIn activity.” You can turn off sharing activity broadcasts (like job changes and work anniversaries) and control whether your connections see your likes and comments in their feeds.<\/p>\n When you add a phone number or email address to LinkedIn, the default visibility is often set to “Connections” or “Connections of connections.” This is broader than most people intend. A phone number visible to second-degree connections means it is accessible to a very large pool of people.<\/p>\n To review and change this: go to your profile, click “Contact info,” and check the visibility on each field individually. Phone numbers in particular should be set to “Only you” unless you have a specific reason to make them visible.<\/p>\n LinkedIn allows you to download a full copy of your data, which includes messages, connection history, search history, ad targeting data, and much more. To access this: go to Settings and Privacy, then Data Privacy, then “Get a copy of your data.”<\/p>\n What you find in that download is often surprising. LinkedIn retains a detailed record of your on-platform behavior including every profile you have viewed (even in private mode), every search you have run, your inferred interests, and the demographic and behavioral categories they have placed you in for advertising purposes. None of this is visible on your profile, but it is part of the data LinkedIn holds on your account. Reviewing it once is worth the five minutes it takes.<\/p>\n Hiding your birthday on LinkedIn is a 90-second fix, and the steps are straightforward once you know where the setting lives. Change the visibility in the “Edit intro” section of your profile, set it to “Only you,” and save. If you want to go further, clear the field entirely so the date is no longer stored in a visible form.<\/p>\n The more valuable habit is treating that birthday change as the first step in a deliberate privacy review rather than a one-time task. The birthday field drew your attention, but the connections list visibility setting is the one that carries more real-world risk for most professionals. Go check that one next. Settings and Privacy, then Visibility, then Connections. Set it to “Only you.” That single change limits what competitors, prospects, and recruiters can learn about your network, and it takes about the same amount of time as hiding your birthday did.<\/p>\n Go to your LinkedIn profile, click the pencil icon in your intro section, scroll to “Personal information,” and find the birthday field. Click the visibility dropdown next to your birthday and select “Only you.” Click Save. Your birthday date stays stored in the system but is no longer visible to any other LinkedIn user. LinkedIn will also stop sending birthday notifications to your connections.<\/p>\n LinkedIn collects your birthday for a few purposes. It uses the data to power birthday notifications sent to your connections, which increases platform engagement. It also uses your birth year for age-based audience segmentation in its advertising system. LinkedIn advertisers can target users by age range, and your birth year is how LinkedIn places you in those ranges. This is documented in LinkedIn’s privacy policy under “How we use your data.”<\/p>\n No. When you set your birthday visibility to “Only you,” no other LinkedIn user can see it, including first-degree connections. The only exception would be if someone already viewed your birthday before you changed the setting and made note of it.<\/p>\n Your overall profile completeness percentage may drop slightly if LinkedIn counts the birthday as part of its completeness calculation and the field is now either empty or set to “Only you.” However, LinkedIn’s completeness score does not affect your visibility in search results or recruiter searches. It is a guidance metric for new users and has no meaningful impact on how your profile performs on the platform.<\/p>\n No. LinkedIn only sends birthday notifications when your birthday visibility is set to “Your connections” or “All LinkedIn members.” Setting it to “Only you” stops all birthday-related notifications to your network.<\/p>\n If your birthday is set to “Your connections” and a recruiter is connected to you, they can see it. If it is set to “All LinkedIn members,” anyone can see it. Set it to “Only you” and no recruiter, regardless of their account type or LinkedIn Premium status, can access it. LinkedIn Recruiter and LinkedIn Talent Hub do not have the ability to override a user’s personal privacy settings.<\/p>\n It depends on your risk tolerance and professional context. The primary concerns are age inference (relevant during job searches), phishing exposure (birthday data is commonly used in social engineering attacks and security question verification), and unwanted birthday notifications from professional contacts. For most professionals, the downside of visibility outweighs any benefit, since LinkedIn does not require a visible birthday to function effectively as a networking or job search tool.<\/p>\n Go to your profile, click the pencil icon in your intro section, scroll to “Personal information,” and clear both the birth month\/day and birth year fields. Click Save. This removes the date from your visible profile and from LinkedIn’s active use of it for birthday notifications. For a more thorough data removal request, LinkedIn offers a formal data deletion option under Settings and Privacy, then Data Privacy, then “Get a copy of your data,” where you can also request deletion of specific personal data categories under applicable privacy regulations including GDPR and CCPA.<\/p>\n Yes. LinkedIn’s advertising platform allows advertisers to target users by age range, and your birth year is the data point LinkedIn uses to place you in those ranges. Hiding your birthday from other users does not automatically stop this. To reduce age-based ad targeting, go to Settings and Privacy, then Advertising data, and adjust your ad personalization preferences separately.<\/p>\n The highest-impact settings to review after your birthday are: your connections list visibility (set to “Only you” to prevent competitors and recruiters from mapping your network), your phone number visibility (often set to “Connections” by default, which is broader than most people intend), your profile viewing mode (private browsing stops others from seeing when you view their profiles), and your activity and shares visibility (controls what your connections see when you like or comment on posts). All of these are under Settings and Privacy in the Visibility section.<\/p>\n Possibly, through indirect signals. Your graduation years, years at various employers, and the general timeline of your career are visible on your profile and allow someone to estimate your age within a range. Hiding your birthday removes the most direct data point, but it does not make your approximate age completely invisible to someone who wants to work it out from your work history. For most professional purposes, removing the exact birthday is sufficient.<\/p>\n No evidence suggests that birthday visibility affects LinkedIn’s feed algorithm, search ranking, or content distribution. LinkedIn’s algorithm prioritizes factors like connection degree, engagement history, profile completeness, and content relevance. Birthday privacy settings do not appear in LinkedIn’s published guidance on how its algorithm works and are not a ranking factor.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" LinkedIn is a professional network, but it holds more personal data than most people realize. 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\n
LinkedIn Birthday Notifications Can Feel Professionally Awkward<\/h3>\n
Your Birthday Affects What LinkedIn Shows About You<\/h3>\n
How to Hide Your Birthday on LinkedIn (Desktop, Step-by-Step)<\/h2>\n
\n
\n
How to Hide Your Birthday on LinkedIn (Mobile App, Step-by-Step)<\/h2>\n
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Hide vs. Delete: What’s the Difference and Which Should You Choose?<\/h2>\n
Setting to “Only You”<\/h3>\n
Deleting the Birthday Field Entirely<\/h3>\n
Who Should Delete vs. Who Should Just Hide<\/h3>\n
\n
What Happens After You Hide Your Birthday (Common Questions Answered)<\/h2>\n
Will LinkedIn still notify your connections after you hide it?<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Will people who already saw your birthday still remember it?<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Does hiding your birthday affect your LinkedIn SSI score or profile completeness?<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Can LinkedIn Premium users still see your birthday if you hide it?<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Does LinkedIn use your birthday for advertising even after you hide it?<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Will hiding your birthday change how recruiters find you?<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Birthday Was Just the Start: The LinkedIn Privacy Settings Most People Miss<\/h2>\n
Who Can See Your Connections List<\/h3>\n
Profile Viewing Options (What You See vs. What They See)<\/h3>\n
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Controlling Who Sees Your Activity and Shares<\/h3>\n
Email and Phone Number Visibility<\/h3>\n
Data Download and What LinkedIn Actually Holds on You<\/h3>\n
Conclusion<\/h2>\n
Frequently Asked Questions<\/h2>\n
How do I hide my birthday on LinkedIn without deleting it?<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Why does LinkedIn ask for my birthday in the first place?<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Can my LinkedIn connections see my birthday even after I hide it?<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Does hiding my birthday on LinkedIn affect my profile completeness score?<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Will LinkedIn still send birthday notifications to my connections if I set my birthday to “Only you”?<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Can recruiters see my birthday on LinkedIn?<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Is it safe to have my birthday visible on LinkedIn?<\/strong><\/h3>\n
How do I completely remove my birthday from LinkedIn?<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Does LinkedIn use my birthday for targeted advertising?<\/strong><\/h3>\n
What other personal information should I hide on LinkedIn for better privacy?<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Can someone find my age on LinkedIn even if I hide my birthday?<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Does hiding my birthday on LinkedIn affect how the algorithm treats my profile?<\/strong><\/h3>\n