Like it or not, Facebook Messenger may be inevitable, especially if your friends and family have chosen the app as their primary messaging service. I know people who kept Facebook accounts just to keep using Messenger. But iseven if you are on Facebook without any qualms, there are some Messenger features that you should be aware of to get the most out of the service while protecting your privacy.
If you don’t want people to see if you’re online – and how much time has passed since the last time you logged in – just tap your profile photo in the upper left corner of the Messenger app and select Active status to turn it off. These profile settings are also where you can activate Dark mode, which will give your eyes a break while you chat.
In Settings, you can customize who is allowed to send messages to you. Touch Privacy and then Message Delivery to allow all your Facebook friends to send you messages, just friends who have your phone number, etc. In Preferences, select Phone contacts and disable the Messenger’s ability to access all contacts from your phone’s address book. This prevents Facebook from having data on people who may not want the company to know anything about them, and it’s also just good practice in general.
If you want to make Messenger even more private, you can turn on end-to-end encryption and messages that disappear by tapping a contact’s name in a chat and selecting Enable secret conversations. Swiping up in a conversation will allow Vanish mode which will not encrypt your messages, but will make them disappear when you leave the conversation. You will still receive a notification if your contact’s screenshots are in Vanish mode (or vice versa), so if you need to say: Don’t use this to be scary.