WAIncognito

Perhaps one of the reasons why WhatsApp is so popular nowadays is because it has a simple and straightforward system for letting you know if the recipient received and read your message. Since the same applies to your messages, some people use Read Receipts to disable the aforementioned feature, so they can respond on their own time.

WAIncognito is a Chrome extension for WhatsApp web that has the role of disabling Read Receipts and Presence Updates. What this means is that while you can see other people’s actions, yours are never sent.

After you install it to Chrome, you are prompted to scan the QR code and hence, connect to your WhatsApp account. It goes without saying that this step is only necessary if you didn’t use the web version of WhatsApp before.

The extension essentially adds a new menu for WhatsApp where you can toggle two options on and off, Read Receipts and Last Seen. Once the receipts are blocked, the unread messages are displayed as transparent, whereas the ones you read are highlighted with red. It is easy to tell when you are in incognito mode.

A further noteworthy feature of the extension is that it can keep deleted messages so that they can be restored at a later time. Moreover, you can configure it to send the receipts after a given interval automatically, option that you can cancel any time.

According to the developer, the extension comes with a limitation, namely that it doesn’t work in multi-device mode. If you block the Last Seen option here, then it means you can’t also see when the other participants Last Seen. The reason for this is that typically WhatsApp servers do not send Presence Updates to offline devices.

Providing that you are not using multi-device mode and mainly using WhatsApp web for updates and conversations, then perhaps you can consider giving WAIncognito a try.