On your Android smartphone or iPhone, there’s a handy feature related to your messages. While it offers undeniable advantages, it also comes with its share of constraints, particularly regarding your privacy. We explain how to disable it if necessary.
When you send a message from your smartphone, you don’t necessarily expect an immediate response. The same goes for receiving a text message; you may not be available to respond immediately. Unfortunately, there’s a feature enabled by default on your smartphone that can force your hand: read receipts.
As you may know, on iPhone, Android, and instant messaging apps like WhatsApp or Messenger, the sender can now quickly find out if their message has been read by the recipient. On Messenger, for example, a short tap on a message displays the full list of people who have read it. On WhatsApp, the read confirmation appears as two blue ticks displayed right next to the sent time.
Read confirmation, advantages… and major disadvantages
While there are many valid reasons to enable read receipts on your text messages, it’s important to be aware that this feature can quickly put unwanted pressure on your shoulders. For example, what if you see a read receipt on one of your messages, but your contact is slow to respond? It’s easy to feel ignored in this situation. Conversely, if the person you’re talking to knows you’ve seen their text, you might feel compelled to respond in a hurry… which is never a good thing, depending on the topic of the conversation.
But above all, read receipts can also pose a risk to your privacy. This is because scammers who use spam or SMS phishing attempts can exploit this information. If they receive a read receipt after contacting you, they’ll know that a real person is behind the number. As a result, they may be led to share your contact information with other hackers. As a result, smishing or SMS scams can multiply on your device. Therefore, disabling read receipts will help protect you from this kind of inconvenience. We’ll explain how to do it on iPhone and Android.
How to Turn Off Read Receipts on iPhone
On iPhones, read receipts are enabled by default. Fortunately, disabling them is very simple. Here it is:
- Go to your device’s Settings
- Now look for the Messages tab
- Scroll through the options until you see Send Read Receipts
- Press the button to disable the feature
Note, however, that iMessages has an option that’s missing on Android and Google Messages. Apple’s messaging app offers a bit more flexibility when it comes to read receipts. Specifically, you can choose to enable them only for specific contacts. Here’s how:
- Open the iMessages app
- Now select a conversation and press the number or name of the contact in question
- Look for the Send read receipts option and enable it if it isn’t already.
How to turn off read receipts on Android
On Android too, and especially if you use Google Messages, read receipts are also enabled by default. But here again, the procedure for disabling them isn’t very complicated. Here it is:
- Open Google Messages and click on your profile icon located in the top right corner of the screen
- In the window, look for the Settings tab of the Messages app
- Now tap on the first option, which is RCS Chats
- Just below Enable RCS Chats, you will find the Send Read Receipts tab
- Press the button to disable the feature
Note that on the same page, you can also turn off typing indicators if you feel like it. This way, your interlocutors won’t be able to tell if you’re currently typing your response.
