Help Center

We understand that many users are interested in maintaining privacy in their orkut.com profiles. While orkut.com is intended to provide an open platform for users to interact, we have several options for protecting your privacy. First and foremost, we recommend that you don't post any personal information you don't want anyone else to see.

Profile and feature privacy

You can use your orkut privacy settings to restrict who's allowed to write in your scrapbook, comment on your photos, and see your album, videos, scrapbook, testimonials, and feeds. To do so, just follow these steps:

1. Click the settings button on the left sidebar.
2. Select the privacy tab.
3. Use the drop-down menu next to each feature to change access permissions.

Restrict access to profile information

You can omit your name from our search results or prevent certain users from viewing your profile and profile information, by restricting access to many parts of your profile. Just click edit next to the profile link, under your photo. On each tab, you can set viewing permissions for any fields that display a drop-down menu and a key icon.

For example, if you want everyone to be able to see your birth date, choose the date from the 'birth day' drop-down menu, select everyone from the key drop-down menu to the right, and click update.

Please keep in mind that certain parts of your profile can't be hidden from other users. Any profile fields that don't have a drop-down menu with a key icon can be viewed by all orkut.com members, unless your profile is set to private. Similarly, your primary email address can't be hidden from people you've added to your friends list. If you don't want to show this part of your profile to other users, we suggest you remove any information in those areas (for example, leave the 'birth date' field blank).

Preview your profile as other orkut users see it

When viewing your orkut.com profile, a drop-down menu at the top of the page reads, This is how my profile will look to: myself. When you change this field to friends, friends of friends, or everyone, your profile will display different amounts of information depending on the privacy settings you've chosen. Remember that this doesn't change the actual settings; rather, it gives you the opportunity to see your profile as others will see it.

Ignore other users

We offer the ability to prevent specific users from sending you unwanted scraps, messages, friend requests, invitations and testimonials; just add them to your ignore list. To do so, visit their profile, point your mouse to the more link on the left sidebar, and click ignore user.