If you still have a Facebook account, you will automatically have a Messenger account. Whether you notice it or not, Messenger is one of the most popular apps in the world. (I only use it to sell all of my personal items in the marketplace, but it has other functions.) Here are the best features that can be activated for more privacy and convenience.
If you tap your profile picture in the top left, you will see the settings menu. This option allows you to turn on dark mode for nightly messaging sessions. This menu also has “Active Status”, which you can turn off so that other people can’t see if you are online or when you were last logged in.
Scroll down to “Privacy” and select “Messaging”. That way you can customize who can notify you in the app – just your Facebook friends, anyone with your phone number, etc. You can then decide whether these messages go straight to your inbox as chats or as easy-to-ignore message requests. In the Settings section, select Phone Contacts to control the information the app pulls from your address book.
While in a chat, click on the other party’s photo and scroll down to Go to Secret Conversation. This will bring up a new chat that offers end-to-end encryption and message disappearing. If you are only having a normal conversation, you can activate the “disappearance mode”, whereby your messages continue to disappear, but without the additional encryption. Note, however, that Vanish mode notifies all attendees when someone is taking a chat as a screenshot.
