Ever wanted a little more privacy when texting from your phone? You’re lucky.
“Stealth” settings are becoming more common and advanced as Apple and Meta (the company behind WhatsApp and Facebook) battle to show they’re more privacy-focused.
These range from self-deleting “disappearing” messages to preventing others from seeing if you’ve read the message you just sent (or if you’re online at all).
Send an iMessage with invisible ink
You can send a message in “invisible ink” that recipients can swipe across the screen to view
You can send a message in “invisible ink” that recipients can swipe across the screen to view: Invisible Ink is one of Apple’s animated message bubble effects.
To activate it, enter a message in a new or existing conversation.
Touch and hold the Send button, then tap the gray dots to preview different effects.
Tap the Send button to send the message.
Stop people from sniffing your iMessages over your shoulder
If you have an iPhone X or later, the TrueDepth camera is intelligently activated so others cannot see your messages in iMessage
If you look at your camera, you’ll see a full preview of your message on your lock screen, but if someone else looked at your iPhone, they wouldn’t see the preview.
To enable this feature, go to Settings > Face ID & Passcode and press the slider to enable attention features.
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Go to Settings > Face ID & Passcode and press the slider to turn on attention features to prevent people from snooping on your iMessages over your shoulder
Prevent iMessage contacts from seeing if you’ve read a message
It can be helpful when a friend or colleague sees that you’ve read their message—but it can also be irritating because you’ll have to reply.
Luckily, it’s possible to turn off the feature — whether you want to do it for all calls or just a single one.
Go to Settings > Messages, then turn Read Receipts on or off.
Delete an IMessage you just sent
We all know that moment when you send a message and then you think, “No!”. – Thankfully, it’s possible to disable iMessage messages for up to two minutes.
The recipient will get a message letting them know you didn’t send a message – but they won’t know what it said.
To unsend a message, tap it, touch and hold the message bubble, and then tap Unsend.
A note confirming that you didn’t send the message appears in both your and the recipient’s conversation transcript.
Activate “stealth mode” in WhatsApp
“Stealth mode” allows WhatsApp users to hide whether they’re online or not, or choose which users can see when they’re online
“Stealth mode” allows users to hide whether they are online or not.
It also lets a person decide who they want to allow to see their online status.
It was one of several new tools that Meta, WhatsApp’s parent company, unveiled in 2022.
Meta described the tool in a press release as one of several designed to keep messages “as private and secure as face-to-face conversations.”
To enable it, go to “Privacy” under Settings, where you can adjust an option, “Who can see when I’m online”.
Set it to “As Last Seen” and change the settings to “Last Seen” to exclude the contacts you don’t want to see when you’re online.
Or you can set it to “Nobody” and your contacts will then see that you are online.
Disable the blue ticks in WhatsApp
Impatient messengers love WhatsApp’s blue ticks, which let you instantly see if your message has been read.
But it’s easy to turn off the trademark ticks and leave people hanging instead.
Go to Settings > Privacy and toggle the “Read Receipts” slider to the “Off” position.
However, users who enable this feature will still send read receipts in group chats.
If you’re worried about news that will haunt you at some point in the future, why not set a timer for it to self-destruct?
Automatically delete your messages in WhatsApp
If you’re concerned that your message history might haunt you later, you can set your WhatsApp to automatically delete it.
WhatsApp users can set timers that automatically delete messages between 24 hours and 90 days after they are sent.
Go to Settings > Privacy and select Disappearing Messages to enable the timer.
However, this only applies to chats sent after the timer has been set.
Older messages must be deleted manually if no timer was previously set.
Disable “Last seen” on whatsapp
A look at the “last seen” time of frequent WhatsApp users is a great way to see if they woke up in the morning or got out of their lunch meeting.
However, users can turn off the feature to avoid being bothered when they first check their phone in the morning.
To do this, go to Settings > Privacy and you can set “Last Seen” to “Everyone”, “Nobody”, “My Contacts” or “My Contacts Except…”, which allows you to exclude specific people.
Prevent people from forwarding your WhatsApp pictures or taking screenshots
When you send a picture in WhatsApp using the View Once feature, the app blocks downloading, forwarding, or screenshots – great for sending pictures during a night out.
When you send a picture in WhatsApp, just select the little “one” in the window that says “Add Caption” and it will be sent in View Once mode.
Prevent others from seeing when you’re online on Facebook Messenger
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Like many modern apps, Facebook Messenger offers story functionality—but you don’t have to share it with your entire contact list. To restrict your stories, go to Privacy & Security > Story Controls
The green “on” light that shows you’re online in Messenger can expose you to unwanted attention — but you can turn it off.
To do this, go to the gear icon next to your name, select Active status and turn off the slider.
You can also prevent others from seeing when you are active in the same chat as them.
This can be toggled to the off position by turning the slider that says “Show when you’re active together”.
Prevent others from seeing your Facebook stories
Like many modern apps, Facebook Messenger offers story functionality—but you don’t have to share it with your entire contact list.
To restrict your stories, go to Privacy & Security > Story Controls.
Choose Custom and select the contacts you want to see your stories.
Limit who can message you on Facebook
By default, people who know your cell phone number for some reason can send you messages through Messenger — as can friends of Facebook friends.
You can turn this off so they have to send message requests instead of being able to message you in the first place.
Go to Privacy & Settings > Messaging – and from there you can either set it to “Chats,” which allows others to send you a message, or to Message Requests, where they have to make a request, or to “No Requests.” receive”. , which blocked people altogether.