Almost everyone who uses Whatsapp has “watched” the last connection hour of someone to whom we have sent a message to know if they have already read it. Sometimes we need to know if that person is aware or not of our message and to verify this data can be “indicative”.
The information provided by the “last time” and the fact that it can be hidden awakens all kinds of suspicions and obsessive surveillance behaviors. Questions like: has he blocked me perhaps? Why doesn’t he answer me? Has he deleted me from his contact list? And others related to the privacy of the application are continuous in the comments that our readers leave.
If for example we sent a message to someone at 12:00 pm and ten minutes later we see that the last time they were connected was at 12:02 pm, we can reasonably suspect that they read it. Added to this is the possibility of hiding the notification of reading with the double blue check that Android has and the privacy settings that each user can choose, which gets quite complicated to know for sure if someone has read or not our message. We will see how we can confuse our contacts by reading messages without altering our last connection.
There is a way to fool the one who watches over us. We can read and even write messages without showing when the last real time that we connected was and without needing to hide it. In other words, we can…
Use Whatsapp without modifying the last connection
It is a measure that we can use, for example, if we are subject to surveillance by some of our contacts. It will allow us to read their messages and use the application without altering or hiding the last connection time. It works if we are users of an Android or Windows phone, but not if it is an iPhone.
How do we do it?
- We need to turn off the read notification we find in the ‘Settings> Account> Privacy’ (Android) section. This will not show the blue marks to our contacts after reading the messages, although we must know that we will also be hidden.
If we do not do it, we might offer confusing information, such as the one shown in the first image. Our contact sees that we have read the message by the blue color of the marks but apparently our last connection was previous to the sending.
- Airplane mode. To prevent the application from updating our last connection time, we must open it when the phone lacks Internet connection and has eliminated its activity from the background (all active applications are shown by one of the lower buttons, normally the one on the right and the application is moved to the side with your finger until it disappears). The simplest way to cancel the connection on a mobile phone is to use the “airplane” function, which instantly disconnects any wireless connection.
The same effect would have the deactivation of the Wi-Fi connection and the Internet telephone network, but it is faster and easier to use this “airplane mode” function.
- Now we can open Whatsapp, read all the messages that have arrived so far and even write new messages responding to the conversations, even if we do not have an Internet connection.
- At the end, we must close Whatsapp, remove the application also in the background and then recover the connections by turning off the airplane mode.
- Our messages will come out as soon as we recover the connection even if we have the application closed, but the time of “last time” will not be modified.
There are even applications, such as Whatsapp Ghost or Shh for Android, that perform these tasks automatically whenever we are going to use Whatsapp, allowing a “almost normal” use of this but making sure that the data of our last connection remains unchanged.