For 10 years my wife's read receipt has been turned on without her knowing it. She kept checking her phone settings to see if they were turned off. But every time I texted her, I found out my message was delivered and what time she read it. It's enough to say, this has brought some nasty moments.
Reading receipts is a painful place for many couples, friends, family and employers. In fact, anyone who sends and receives text messages these days. It wasn't always like this. Just a few years ago, you could send a text and not expect an unwelcome reminder of sunlight that the recipient was reading your message but didn't respond.
However, these days, reading receipts is not a bad manners. They can become invitations for scammers to target you. You can also turn them off in the default messaging apps on iOS and Android, but you can also consider using completely different apps for your daily text messaging needs.
However, seriously, stop using read receipts on any of the messaging apps. Turn them off. There is little to give this little clue as to how you are spending your time and attention. There are many benefits to sending texts and going back to a more primitive form of communication where you don't know what will happen next. You may find comfort in not knowing whether the message has been read or not. Maybe it's just lost in cyberspace and maybe you should move on to your day rather than fretting.
It wasn't long ago that this was how text messaging works. The first text messages were sent in 1992 using SMS or technology, a short messaging service. “Merry Christmas.” Ten years later I got an MMS or multimedia messaging service. It worked like an SMS and used images, videos and audio files.
Just a few years ago, you could send a text and not expect an unwelcome reminder of sunlight that the recipient was reading your message but didn't respond.
A similar feature existed in email, but BlackBerry receives credits for the first read receipt of text messages from BBM Instant Messaging Services, which was launched in 2005. At the time, we were unable to turn off the read receipts there. So, the BlackBerry forum is packed with tips and tricks to avoid this.
Apple made the feature mainstream when it launched Imessage in 2011. Four years later, the situation was complicated by adding the ability to send read receipts to certain people. Rich Communication Services (RCS) is a messaging protocol that began to gain widespread adoption in the years since Imessage was launched, bringing read receipts to most Android devices.
So, what is a read receipt? In fact, it's just a bit of metadata, or some of the information that describes other information. In this case, it contains details about the text message. This will take place when it opens or when. So when someone opens a message, the metadata will bounce back to the original sender, notifying them that the message has been read. There are also delivery receipts (but not read) that tell the sender that the message has arrived to the recipient. These are common features on both default messaging apps and dedicated messaging platforms such as WhatsApp, Signal, and more. Unfortunately, delivery receipts like read receipts cannot be turned off.
You can insist that reading receipts is good. And in some circumstances, I agree. Parents can see that teenagers, bosses texting employees, husbands texting their spouses, knowing that the message was seen is valuable, and that doesn't create clumsiness. However, in other social environments, you simply create a dissonance.
“We get information that implies that a response is approaching. If not, we are underestimated. This just makes sense. Jeffrey A. Hall, professor of communication studies at the University of Kansas, told me: “It plays with our expectations.”
Put another way, the receipt I read is excited to hear from a friend. Otherwise you will naturally become frustrated.
For example, if you have received spam texts and opened them, the bad actor on the other side of the exchange knows that you are a person.
This has a darker, more technical aspect. Read receipts are lines of code exchanged between the sender and the recipient of the message, and can be exploited by hackers and scammers. For example, if you have received and opened spam text, the bad actor on the other side of the exchange knows that you are a person and are more likely to target you with more spam text.
It's getting worse. In a 2024 preprint paper, researchers from the University of Vienna explained the worst case scenario in which they could not read receipts and delivery receipts.
Potentially, you used these features in a more harmless way and without bad intentions. For example, when your partner is on the way home in an unsafe neighbourhood and knows that the batteries are low, you can wait to people them with any message and see if their phone is still on. “Also, if you send a message to someone on the flight, they will later be notified of the exact time they landed.”
This approach also works with encrypted apps such as WhatsApp and Signal. Things can get worse if the receipt details are taken in the wrong order.
“Both delivery and read receipts can be abused by people who are actually close to you,” Gegenharbor said. “Because of the information they are leaking, they can be used to abuse stalkers and intimate partners.”
Turning off read receipts is an easy way to avoid being targeted by both social fake PAs and scammers and other bad actors. Apple has a great guide to turning them off on your iPhone, iPad and Mac. This includes instructions for turning it off system-wide and specific people's instructions. Google offers one switch to turn them off on Android devices. There is a guide for that. After that, it depends on the app. Here are some helpful links for WhatsApp and Signal:
You might also consider simply dropping your phone's default messaging app completely and using one of those third-party apps. In particular, Signal is my favorite app. End-to-end encrypted, private by default, run by a nonprofit, and is free. You can also expect to avoid spam.
When someone at the signal receives a message from someone for the first time, they come across what we call a “Message Request” screen, Jun Harada, Vice President of Partnerships and Growth at Signal, told me. This way, you can't accidentally click on the link or open the file, and see what's in the message “without worrying about information that might be sent back to the sender,” says Hurada.
In the process of reporting this story, I was able to understand why my wife continued to get receipts that she read for me and me alone. She somehow turned them off for everyone else but I was the last holdout. Now my read receipt privilege has been revoked, but as you know, I'm fine with that.
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