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.