There’s a setting on your iPhone called read receipts that can let people know that you have read their text messages.
You might not like others to have this information, and wonder if there’s a way to prevent it from happening.
Our tutorial about how to turn off read receipts on an iPhone 13 continues below with additional discussion on this topic.
How to Stop Other People from Knowing You Read Their Text Messages on iPhone
- Open Settings.
- Choose Messages.
- Disable Send Read Receipts.
Our guide continues below with additional information on turning off iPhone read receipts, including pictures of these steps.
Have you ever noticed the word “Read” appear under a text message that someone has sent to you? If you don’t like seeing that there then you may want to know how to turn off read receipts on an iPhone 13.
This happens because you have opened the text message conversation on your iPhone 13 and viewed that message.
But that isn’t something that has to happen, and it is controlled by a “read receipt” setting on the device.
You can disable iPhone 13 read receipts by going to Settings > Messages > and tapping the button next to Send Read Receipts to turn it off.
Once you have stopped these read receipts from being sent then you can view the messages that you receive without needing to worry that the sender already knows you have seen the message.
This not only gives you some time to determine the correct response, but it also gives you a little bit of privacy regarding your participation in the conversation.
Our tutorial continues below with additional information about settings for the iPhone 13 Messages app.
If you have a picture in a text message conversation that you don’t want someone else to see if they have your phone, then you may want to remove it. Read our guide on how to delete pictures from text message conversations on an iPhone for more information.
How to Stop Showing “Read” Under iPhone Text Messages (Guide with Pictures)
The steps in this article were performed on an iPhone 13 in the iOS 15.4.1 operating system.
Step 1: Open the Settings app on your device.
Step 2: Scroll down and choose the Messages option.
Step 3: Turn off the Send Read Receipts option.
Now that you know how to turn off read receipts on an iPhone 13 you might be curious about some of the other settings for the Messages app on your device.
Our guide continues below with additional discussion about turning off text message read receipts on an iPhone.
Video About Turning Off iPhone Read Receipts
More Information on iPhone 13 Read Receipts
The steps in this article are going to stop other people from being able to see that you have read a text message or iMessage that they sent to you. However, you will still be able to see whether they have read text messages that you sent to them unless they have also turned off read receipts.
If you don’t like the default Messages app on your iPhone then you might want to look into a third party option. Whatsapp is a popular text messaging service that you may want to try out.
This only affects the default “Messages” app. This won’t affect any read receipts or similar features in other apps.
If you haven’t gone into the Message settings menu before there are probably some options here that you might want to change. Some of these options are:
- Share Name and Photo – this is the bar that appears at the top of a conversation where you can choose to share your picture and name with the other person in the conversation.
- Show Contact Photos – determines whether or not a contact’s picture appears next to their conversation if you have set a picture for that contact.
- Send as SMS – this uses the standard text messaging service as a fallback if an iMessage can’t be sent for some reason.
- Keep Messages – you can choose the keep your text messages until you manually delete them, or let your iPhone delete them automatically after a chosen period of time.
- Low Quality Image Mode – you can choose to send images in a lower resolution so that they use less data.
Matthew Burleigh has been writing technology how-to articles and tutorials for over a decade. He has extensive experience in information technology both in small business and as a consultant.
His articles have appeared on dozens of websites and been read millions of times.
He covers many different topics concerning technology, but focuses primarily on smartphones, consumer software, and consumer electronics.
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