Do you have contacts that haunt you on WhatsApp checking if you are online or not? Do you want to prevent showing the last login you made on the most popular messaging app? Whatever your needs, in this guide you will find all the steps to hide the online status of WhatsApp and thus be able to chat without letting you know your last access to the other contacts in your address book or only to a small number of people.
If you have not yet installed the WhatsApp app on your mobile device, you can quickly fix it by downloading it from one of the links below based on the operating system of the device you use.
DOWNLOAD | WhatsApp (Android)
DOWNLOAD | WhatsApp (iOS)
How not to be seen online on WhatsApp
To effectively hide the WhatsApp online status, open the app installed on your device, then click on the top three dots on the top right and select Settings . Within the new screen that you will see appearing you will have to go to the path Account > Privacy , where you will find all the items to adjust the privacy settings of WhatsApp.
The options available to hide the online status of WhatsApp are many, here below you will see how to best adjust them:
- Last access : you can choose who to view the last access on WhatsApp, choosing from All , My contacts or None . To get the maximum level of privacy choose None , so you will no longer show the time you last accessed.
- Profile image : you can choose whether to display the profile image or not; also in this case you can choose between All , My contacts or None . If you care about privacy, select None again .
- Info : allows you to adjust which personal information to show; you can choose between All , My contacts or None. To get the maximum in terms of privacy select None.
- Status : this item allows you to adjust the visibility of personal statuses. In this case the options are different: you can choose between My contacts , My contacts except and Share with . If there is any contact you do not wish to see your status, simply use the My contacts item except , selecting the contact you do not want to see your status updates.
- Current position : shows which contacts have received information about your position in the past. You can remove all present contacts for more privacy.
Using all the recommended settings above you will be able to hide the online status of WhatsApp without problems.
The other change I recommend is to deactivate reading confirmations, managed by an item with the “on / off” button in the same screen ( Account > Privacy ).
Set the button to “off” (the dot must be gray and to the left as shown in the photo above) under the heading ” Confirmation of reading” to stop the double blue check from appearing next to each message you have read so you can read the messages without the other person knowing. Obviously this change will also affect the contacts you see, so you will no longer see the confirmation of reading by anyone else until you reactivate the function.
The speech is not valid in messages exchanged in group chats, in this case reading confirmations are always sent and received.
With these settings configured as recommended no contact you know (except the ones you selected) will ever see your last login or if you have read or not received messages.
If instead you want to exclude the possibility that a certain contact can interact with you you can follow our guide on how to block a contact on WhatsApp.
And if you want to know how to hide the online status every time you open the app to prevent contacts from appearing online when they open a chat with you? In this case there is no official remedy to hide the online status on all the chats that concern you, but you can apply old tricks always valid to be able to send messages and read without leaving a trace of your passage:
- Forcefully close the WhatsApp app from the app manager or with the integrated task manager;
- set the Airplane Mode on your smartphone;
- reopen WhatsApp and read / write the message we intend to send from “offline”;
- forcefully close the WhatsApp app again from the app manager or with the integrated task manager;
- disable Airplane Mode and connect to WiFi or Data connection.
By following these instructions you will be able to read any messages you have received without showing the online status and you can also send new messages without being seen online.