Hiding your last seen or your read times costs you something: on a free account you stop seeing other people's as well. The privacy is reciprocal by design.
Premium removes that link, which makes this one of the few places where paying buys you an asymmetry rather than a feature.
What you will be able to do
- check_circle Understand what hiding your status costs you.
- check_circle Know what Premium changes about it.
- check_circle Read the approximate statuses correctly.
- check_circle Respect somebody who has switched it off entirely.
The privacy screen states the trade when you set your status to be hidden.
balance A fair rule, and a paid exception
The reciprocity is deliberate and, on its own terms, reasonable: you do not get to watch when other people are around while making yourself invisible. Either everybody in a conversation is visible or nobody is, and that keeps the setting honest.
Premium relaxes it. A subscriber can hide their own presence and still see the presence of people who share theirs, which is one-way visibility bought rather than earned. Worth knowing about whichever side of it you are on: somebody appearing offline is not necessarily offline.
One thing the payment does not buy is access to somebody who has chosen to be invisible. If a person has set their status to nobody, they are hidden from everybody — subscribers included. The person's own choice always wins, which is the part of this design worth approving of.
Four positions
Most people are in the first one without having chosen it.
public The default
swap_horiz Hiding on a free account
star Buying the asymmetry
shield When somebody is invisible
Free accounts trade even; subscribers trade one way; a hidden person is hidden from everybody.
settings Setting yours
- Open last seen and read time in privacy settings They are separate controls.
- Try contacts rather than everybody The middle setting fits most people.
- Add exceptions instead of changing the rule For the few who matter either way.
- Accept the trade on a free account Hiding yours hides theirs.
- Do not read absence as absence A hidden status means nothing about who is online.
- Leave somebody's nobody alone It is not about you.
This page is one trade inside the privacy screen. The curriculum step is the whole screen: phone visibility, who can find you, forwarding controls, and which of these settings actually change what strangers can learn about you.
At a glance
- 1Reciprocal rule
Hiding your last seen hides others' from you.
- 2Premium exception
Subscribers can see others while hiding their own.
- 3Their choice wins
Nobody sees a status set to Nobody.
Updated
