WhatsApp informs the sender whether you have read a message on your smartphone by placing two blue check marks under the message. Here we show you how you can prevent this, and how you can mark a message as unread with a detour.
It is possible that you do not (immediately) want someone to see that you have read the WhatsApp message that he or she has sent you. Because some people get nervous or angry when they see that you've read something but don't respond to it, while you may just be really busy and can't answer until later. To avoid a lot of hassle, or to get a little more privacy, it can therefore be nice to disable the blue check marks of WhatsApp. Also read: 3 useful tips for WhatsApp.
By default, WhatsApp notifies the sender whether his or her message has been sent, arrived, or read. This is indicated by a gray check mark, two gray check marks and two blue check marks respectively. You cannot uncheck the boxes for group conversations, but you can for individual conversations.
Disable blue ticks completely
You can disable the function in the app itself, but that also means that you cannot see whether your messages have been read or not. If you don't care, you can disable this option completely by whatsapp to open and to Settings > Account > Privacy to go. Uncheck Read receipts, and from now on there will be no more blue check marks in individual conversations.
Mark as unread
If you want to be able to see for yourself whether people have read your messages, you can use a trick to prevent a message from being marked as read by the sender. However, this trick will not work on all devices.
Then, as soon as you get a notification that you have received a WhatsApp message, you have to put your device in airplane mode, so that there is no WiFi or mobile data connection. You can then open and read the message unnoticed because WhatsApp cannot connect to its servers to indicate that the message has been read.
When you're done reading, close the conversation and chats hold the call. Choose from the menu that appears Mark as unread. Then you can safely turn your WiFi and data connection back on.
On some devices it is possible to increase the WhatsApp notification without opening the message. Reading the notification will not result in two blue ticks being sent to the sender because the message in WhatsApp itself remains unread in this way.
