How To Disable Facebook's "Seen" Feature
One of Facebook's features that concerns your privacy to a high degree is, unfortunately, something that you cannot disable from the social network’s user settings. That is, of course, the “Seen” feature that appears under each message you send or receive. Once you read the message sent to you, a “Seen” notification will appear at the bottom right corner of the sender’s chat window, along with a timestamp of when the message was read.
This feature is particularly troublesome for those who want to ignore a conversation and answer later, but already clicked on the message and the “Seen” notification appeared to the other user.
Fortunately, there are some relatively easy ways with which you can get rid of this feature for good (without having to change social network, even though that wouldn’t be a very bad idea).
Disabling Facebook "Seen" Notification in Chrome and Firefox
If you are using Google Chrome, then you can install the “Facebook™ Chat Privacy” extension, which will give you the ability to turn off the “Seen” feature. In general, what this extension does is indicate to the rest of the other users that you didn’t read their messages, and also disables the “typing” notification from appearing to the other chat users, when you are typing a message.
Mozilla Firefox users can install a similar addon called Chat Undeted.
Download Facebook™ Chat Privacy for Google Chrome here.
Download Chat Undetected for Mozilla FireFox here.
Disabling Facebook "Seen" Notification in Any Browser
If you don’t use Chrome, or generally want an alternative solution that doesn’t include installing additional extensions, then there is a way to disable the “Seen” feature if you have AdBlock Plus (or another similar extension) installed in your browser. Then, the only thing you have to do is add the following custom filter to the extension:
facebook.com/ajax/mercury/change_read_status.php$xmlhttprequest
This will prevent the other party from receiving the “Seen” notification.
Disabling Facebook "Seen" Notification in Android Devices
Last but not least, those who wish to have the same kind of privacy in their Android devices, then they can enjoy it as well by using Unseen - No Last Seen. This app works by “stealing” messages once they are sent to you, and opens them in its own internal interface so that you can read them freely without having to worry about the read receipt. And the app doesn’t work just for Facebook Messenger- it also works for WhatsApp and Viber as well.
Note that Unseen – No Last Seen is a read-only app, which means that it allows you only to read the messages and not reply to them. If you wish to reply, then you have to open Facebook Messenger (or WhatsApp or Viber) instead.
Download Unseen – No Last Seen for Android here.
There used to be an iOS app that had similar functionality, but unfortunately it was removed from the App Store, so iOS users don’t have this choice, for the time being at least. If you know a way to disable the “Seen” notification in iOS devices, then let us know by posting in the comments section below!
