Is Your X History Private? Who Can See Each Tab

In May 2026, X, the app that used to be Twitter, turned the Bookmarks item in its iPhone app into a tab called History. It holds four lists. Your bookmarks, your likes, the long videos you watched, and the articles you read. Two of those you chose. Two X filled in for you.

That last part is why people are asking whether it is private. A list of what you saved is one thing. A list of what you watched is another, and nobody asked for it. People are now typing “can people see your history on X” into Google.

The short answer is that History is private from people and not private from X. This post goes tab by tab through who can see what, then looks at the one party that can see all four.

Who can see each tab

Here is the whole answer in one table. “Private” on X means private from other accounts. It never means private from X.

The first column is the one most people are worried about, and it is the easy one. Nobody can open your profile and browse your History. There is no History tab on anyone’s public profile, and no setting that makes one. TechCrunch’s report on the launch put it plainly. The History section remains private to you.

The other two columns are where the answer gets interesting.

Bookmarks leave no name behind

A bookmark leaves no name with anyone, and moving it into History did not change that. X’s help center says bookmarks are private and are only viewable to you.

There is one public number. Every post shows how many times it has been bookmarked, and anyone can read it. X’s help page on bookmark counts answers the obvious follow-up. Can you see who bookmarked a post? No. It shows the total, not the accounts. So the author watches a number tick from 41 to 42 and learns nothing about who did it.

Bookmark folders, the paid feature for sorting saves, are just as private. Can people see your bookmarks on X covers every version of the bookmark question in full, including the viral rumor that X was about to make them public. It was not.

Likes are private from everyone but the author

Likes are the tab people most often assume is private, and it only half is.

Until June 2024, anyone could open the Likes tab on your profile and scroll through every post you had hearted. Then X changed it. X’s engineering account announced that likes were going private for everyone. You can still see the posts you liked, and other people cannot. TIME’s report caught the exception. Post authors can still see who liked their content.

So a like is private from your followers, from strangers and from anyone curious about your taste. It is not private from the author. They get a notification with your name on it, the same as always. Every post also still shows a public like count. If you want to keep a post without the author hearing about it, bookmark it instead of liking it. That is the whole difference, in one tap.

In May 2026 the Likes tab started disappearing from profiles, and on the iPhone it now lives inside History. That changes where you find your likes. It does not change who else can see them. If the difference between a like and a bookmark matters to you, X bookmarks vs likes sets the two side by side.

Videos and Articles are logged by X

These are the two tabs nobody asked for, and they are the real reason the privacy question exists.

You never tapped anything to put an entry in Videos or Articles. X logged the long videos you watched and the articles you opened and filed them next to your saves. What the History tab keeps goes through what each tab records and how the rollout happened.

From other people, they are private. No one can see your Videos tab. Watching a video sends no notification to the person who posted it. Some posts carry a public view count, and your view can add to it, but the count has no names behind it.

The Articles tab needs a word of its own. It most likely means X’s own long-form Articles, the format paying accounts can publish, rather than links out to other sites, though X has not spelled it out. Reading one sends the writer no notification that X has documented, and there is no reader list for them to open.

From X, they are not private at all, and never were. The tab did not start the logging. It shows you logging that X’s privacy policy already allowed. The policy, as read on September 23, 2026, lists what X collects. That includes your interactions with other people’s content, such as likes and bookmarks, and log information whenever you view content, including the pages you visit. Before History, that record sat on X’s side where you could not see it. Now X shows you part of it, in a tab.

Private from whom

Every “is it private” answer on X is really an answer about other users. X’s own promise is narrow on purpose. The party that built the tab, and gets the most out of it, is the one party the promise does not cover.

What X does with your History

X’s privacy policy is not vague about this, so it is worth reading in its own words. Three uses matter for History.

1. Recommendations and ads. X uses what it collects to improve and personalize its products, including by showing you more relevant content and ads. A long video you watched to the end is a strong signal of what you like. Expect your feed and your ads to follow it.
2. Training its own AI. The same policy says X may use the information it collects, together with public information, to help train its machine learning and artificial intelligence models.
3. Training other companies’ AI. The policy also describes third-party collaborators. Depending on your settings, X can share data with them, and unless you opt out they may use it to train their own AI models.

None of this is specific to History. The policy covered likes, bookmarks and viewing long before the tab existed. What History changed is that you can now see the list, which makes it easier to picture what X is working from.

How to keep less of it

You cannot make History private from X. You can shrink what X does with it, and how much of it there is.

Turn off AI training: Open Settings and privacy, then Privacy and safety, and look for Grok and Third-party Collaborators. X moves these menus around, so searching your settings for “Grok” is faster than following any path. It decides whether your data can be used for that training, by X and by its partners. X’s policy does not say whether viewing history is part of it.

Clear the video log: Third-party guides point to a setting named Clear video viewing history, under Privacy and safety and then a personalization section. X has not published a help page for it, so treat the path as a starting point. It has not been shown to empty the Videos tab in History, and the tab fills again from the next video you watch.

Remove bookmarks and likes: Un-bookmark or unlike a post and it leaves the tab. Bookmarks has a remove-all option in its menu. Likes does not.

Check your connected apps: Apps you have signed into with your X account can be given permission to read your bookmarks. X’s API has a separate permission for exactly that. Open Settings and privacy, then Security and account access, then Apps and sessions, and remove any app you no longer use. You granted that access, so you can take it back.

Separate what you watch: If the worry is someone else with your phone, the tab is private to your account, not to your device. Sign out on shared devices, or use a second account for viewing you would rather not have filed.

Where your X History stops being private

Two things take your saves out of X’s hands, and each has its own privacy question.

The first is X’s own download. X’s help page on the data archive lists your profile, your posts, your messages, your Lists and the ads you saw. Bookmarks are not named, and developers on X’s own forum have reported that bookmarks are missing from the archive. So the list you built on purpose is the part X does not hand back.

The second is a tool you connect yourself. That is the other way people keep a copy, and it moves the question from X to whoever made the tool. So here is our answer, in full. ContextBolt is a Chrome extension we build. It saves each X bookmark the moment you tap the bookmark icon on x.com, with the post’s text, and stores your library in your browser on your own machine. To tag each save by topic, its text passes through our server to an AI model, and we do not keep it. Pro adds cloud sync, and that copy sits on our servers, where we can read it. Our privacy page spells out every step. Basic is free up to 150 bookmarks. Pro is $6 a month and removes the cap.

If you are reading this on Android or the web and cannot find a History tab at all, that is expected. X rolled it out on iOS and has not announced it anywhere else.

The honest take

Is your X History private? Yes, in the way X means it, and that is not nothing. Nobody can scroll through what you watched, and a bookmark still leaves no name with the author, which a like does not.

But notice who wrote the promise. “Private to you” is a promise about other users, made by the company that keeps the full log, uses it to pick your ads and says it can train AI on it. The tab did not make X know more about you. It made X’s knowledge visible, and then called the view private.

If a list of saves is worth keeping, keep it somewhere you control, and read that tool’s privacy page as closely as you just read this one.