How to Hide “Typing” and “Seen” on Facebook Messenger

How to Hide the Seen and Typing Icons in Desktop Messenger

There’s no built-in option for turning off “typing” or “seen” on the desktop version of Facebook Messenger. As a result, you need to turn to browser extensions to do the job.

You’ll find several Chrome extensions that claim to disable the typing and seen indicators in Messenger. Unfortunately, these tend to come and go, and there’s no guarantee that an extension like this won’t be bought out by spammers. At the time of writing, though, the following options are functional.

We didn’t include Unseen for Facebook, another popular tool, due to several reviews reporting that it hijacked search results.

This extension allows you to disable several Facebook Messenger features:

• The “message seen” icon
• Read receipts
• When you were last active
• The “typing…” indicator

You can also choose to use the extension on messenger.com in addition to Facebook’s Messenger page. The app is well-reviewed and while it hasn’t been updated since January 2019, during testing it functioned properly.

It does require access to all the data on every website you visit, though, which is excessive. Our next option is more privacy-conscious.

This is a less popular extension for the job, but it works just as well. Instead of a list of options, Messenger Unread simply disables read receipts and typing indicators. You can click the extension icon in your toolbar to toggle it on or off when it’s blue, read receipts are disabled.

Messenger Unread was last updated in February 2020, meaning it’s more current than some of the other choices. The tool is also open-source; the developer advertises that it’s only 30 lines of code. This means you can check the source for yourself to make sure there’s nothing shady going on.

In our testing, the “read” indicator still appeared next to our own messages for the other person, but they didn’t know when we had seen their messages.

How to Appear Offline on Facebook Messenger

If you don’t care about read receipts but want friends to think you’re offline on Messenger, you can toggle a setting. Click the Gear icon at the top-left of the Facebook Messenger window. Here, you’ll see a slider labeled Show when you’re active.

Turn this off, and friends won’t see if you’re online or not. Please note that to fully disappear you’ll need to disable it everywhere you use Facebook or Messenger, so you should turn it off on your phone too. To do that, open the Messenger app, tap your profile picture in the top-left, select Active Status, and toggle the slider Off.

How to Hide Read Receipts in Mobile Messenger

There aren’t any extensions like the above when using Facebook Messenger on Android or iOS. For that, you’ll need to employ a few tricks to check messages without showing that you have read them.

Use Notifications to Preview Messages

The first way to peek at Facebook Messenger messages is by using the notifications on your device. Both Android and iOS allow you to show banners for new notifications and review them at a later time.

Using these, you can see a preview of incoming messages without alerting the other party. The downside to this is that if a message is longer than a few lines, you’ll only see the first part of it in the notification.

First, in the Messenger app, tap your profile picture at the top-left to access options. Here, select Notifications & Sounds and make sure you have notifications On and Notification previews enabled. 

From there, you can read a snippet of incoming messages through your phone’s notification list at any time. It will appear on your lock screen, as well as by dragging down from the top of the screen to show your notification list on both Android and iPhone.