Disable read notification on Facebook chat

When you chat with someone on Facebook, and the person read your message, it displays ‘seen’ along with the time the message was read. While you might find this, a pretty cool feature that allows you to know if your friend is ignoring your message, it presents a real privacy concern for many users.

The good news is that there’s some browser plug in out there in the wild that can disable the ‘seen’ feature when you chat with someone on Facebook.

For Firefox users

There are two ways to do it if you are under Firefox browser. If you are using the popular plug-in Adblock, go to Filter Preferences and click on the Custom Filters tab. Alternatively, you can access it via the shortcut CTRL+SHIFT+F.

 Click on Add filter group and assign it a name of your choice. Right-Click on it and choose Show/Hide filters (CTRL+R). Click on the Add Filter button on the top to add the following rule:

/ajax/mercury/change_read_status.php$domain=facebook.com

A little explanation – The URL above gets triggered (in the background) to notify Facebook that you have read a message on Facebook chat. By adding it to Adblock, you basically instructed it to block this URL so that it doesn’t get triggered at all.
Another way to solve this problem is by installing GreaseMonkey followed by Facebook Read Status Disabler plug-in.

For Chrome users

If you are under Chrome, you can install Facebook Unseen. This plug-in offers some flexibility allowing you to toggle between on and off to either enable or disable the plug in. It also provides you with statistics how many messages have gone ‘unseen’.

 By installing the mentioned plug-ins above, you can now take back control of your Facebook privacy to prevent awkward social interactions.