Do you want to read a message on Instagram while remaining incognito, without the sender noticing? That’s good, Meta will allow you to deactivate the read receipt of DMs, on a case by case basis.
When you read a message (DM) on Instagram, your interlocutor knows it immediately. In fact, you are “betrayed” by a “Seen” who appears under the bubble. A system found in many messaging services, starting with WhatsApp (see our article). But sometimes it can happen that you don’t necessarily want to chat after each message you receive. However, with acknowledgment of receipt, it is impossible to shamelessly ignore messages. Suffice to say that the function greatly displeased users at the time of its launch, because even if it can be practical in certain situations, it can lead to a real lack of confidentiality. Meta clearly seems to have heard the criticism and has decided to back down. As reported Techcrunch, the social network is testing a function to deactivate the reading receipt of a private message, a bit like what you can do on WhatsApp. It was time !
Seen on Instagram: soon a case-by-case validation
In a joint statement, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri announced that users will soon be able to control this unloved feature. “We’ve heard your feedback and have started testing a new feature that lets you turn off receipts in your multimedia messages. Soon, people will be able to choose when to let others see that they’ve read their messages.”says Adam Mosseri.
According to the screenshots published, this new function will be accessible through a “Privacy and Security” menu. To access it, you must tap on a person’s profile in an open discussion, go to the “Who can see your activity” section and deactivate the “Read receipts” toggle. So even if you’ve read someone’s message, they won’t see the “Seen” label below the message. It seems that this function can be used on a case-by-case basis, choosing to activate it or not depending on the interlocutors. It is not specified whether it will be possible to deactivate appearing online.
This new function is currently being tested and should soon be deployed to the general public. Note that Meta also plans to deploy end-to-end encryption protection by default for Instagram DMs once it has completed the deployment of this same function on Messenger.