Sarah Dobbs reckons technology has tried to solve a problem that didn’t exist with read receipts – and created a new one in the process
If there was ever a question that didn’t really need to be asked, it’s “did you get my email?” Of course they got your email... Maybe once, back in the early days of the internet or when spam filters were less selective than they are now, there was a vague possibility that your email might’ve gone walkabout or end up sitting in someone’s junk mail, unnoticed. But that really doesn’t happen very often any more. When we ask “did you get my email?”, what we’re really asking is “could you please actually reply to my email?” or “can you do the thing I asked you to do in my email, now or sooner, because I’m getting impatient?”
The thing is, the person being asked knows what you mean too. Yet, because we live in a society where we’d prefer to couch questions in several layers of politeness rather than say what we really mean, “did you get my email?” leaves a handy get-out for the person being asked. They can say no! They can say, “ooh, actually, let me check,” and buy themselves a bit of extra thinking time, rather than having to admit that they just hadn’t got round to replying or doing whatever the thing was they were being asked to do. Read receipts, though, strip out that layer of plausible deniability. If you’ve ever had a boss who used read receipts on work emails, you’ll know how invasive they can feel when you’re on the receiving end.
Thankfully, most people stopped – or never started – using read receipts on emails. Like so many inventions, they just weren’t doing anything useful, so most people didn’t bother. Yet, over the last couple of years, read receipts have started creeping back into our lives through the apps and social networks we use. So, if you thought read receipts were annoying when they were attached to professional communications, you’re no-doubt aggravated about how awful they can be when they’re attached to social or – God forbid – romantic messages…
I Know When You Read That Message
As long as social media has existed, it’s had read receipts built in. If you can bring yourself to think back to 2005, you might remember that MySpace’s messaging function had them. At any time after sending a message, you could look at your sent items folder and see if the person had looked at your message. This, if you were young and single and prone to overthinking things, could lead to literally hours of soul-searching, as you wondered why the object of your affections hadn’t responded to your carefully crafted missive. If they’d already read it, why wouldn’t they just reply?!? Argh!
MySpace gave way to Facebook, Twitter and half a dozen other social networks, but this new generation of social networking tools is similarly plagued with ways to tell if the recipient of your message has opened it or not yet. Snapchat tells you when it’s delivered your snaps and when the recipient has opened them; it also tells you exactly who’s looked at any of your Story pictures. WhatsApp does the same: you get a grey tick mark next to your message when it’s been sent, two grey ticks when it’s been delivered and two blue ticks when it’s been read.
Facebook is the worst offender, though. As if it weren’t enough that it pushes its awful Facebook Messenger on you, as if it weren’t enough that it already decides you don’t need to see some of the messages people have sent you, helpfully filing them in an ‘other’ folder no-one ever remembers exists, it also insists on telling you when someone has read your message, sticking a little ‘Seen’ with a time stamp under your messages. What’s worse, it’s working on adding read receipts to event invitations – so if you don’t feel like going to your friend’s improv comedy night, Facebook’s engineers are now attempting to nuke your ability to say you didn’t see the invitation.
Whyyyyy?
The thing is, read receipts are solving a problem no-one really has. What good does it do you to know when someone has read your email, if they still haven’t done anything about it? None. What good does it do them to know you read their email at midnight but haven’t replied to it by 10am the next morning? None. There’s nothing you can do with that knowledge except get passive aggressive.
The good news is, in a lot of cases you can turn off read receipts or opt not to send them back, so the sender will only ever know you’ve read their message when you actually reply to it (see below for how-tos). The bad news, though, is that sometimes you can’t. Sometimes you’re stuck with the useless thing.
While you might be technically able to turn read receipts off, you may decide not to because of the consequences. If it is your boss who’s sending all these trackable emails and messages, for example, turning off read receipts might make them think you’re ignoring them. That, we’re afraid, might not be terribly helpful to your career prospects – especially if the rest of your colleagues are happy to submit to such technological tyranny.
Then again, if that’s the situation, it’s as much a people problem as a technological one. In fact, that’s actually the whole issue here: read receipts don’t really take into account the way people really interact or want to interact. We’ve seen that kind of thing a lot over the years; even video calls took a long time to take off because actually, a lot of the time, it’s more convenient to talk to someone without being able to see them (or them being able to see you). Facetime and Skype calls are quite common now, but they’re still not the default. Sometimes, we don’t want everyone to know everything about where we are, what we’re doing and when we’re doing it.
An Alternate Wishlist
You know what would be a load more useful than read receipts, though? A way to recall emails and texts after you’d sent them. A proper way, not the half-hearted fake email recall you can do now, that just sends a followup email asking the recipient not to read your previous missive. All that that does is to make absolutely sure that the other person will read the email you don’t want them to, when otherwise they might have missed it.
Of course, there’s a problem intrinsic to texts and emails, one that also makes them so popular: they are delivered almost instantly. That, however, means that by the time you’ve realised you’ve sent a big moan about your mum to your mum’s email instead of to your best friend, she might have already opened it. How hard could it be to add a feature allowing us to recall as-yetunread emails, though? That’d be a good start – at least it’d mean unwise late night messages could be recalled, anyway.
We’d also like a way to quickly and easily block certain people we never want to hear from or about, ever again; an app that stops other people posting unflattering pictures of us online; and probably some kind of built-in breathalyser for our phones so we can’t post ill-advised tweets on our way home from a night out. They’d all be more useful than read receipts. Get on it, developers.
How To Turn Off Read Receipts
Don’t want people to know you’ve read their message? Want a workaround so you can read and reply to stuff in your own time without sending the person you’re talking to into a tailspin of anxiety about why you haven’t answered them yet? Here’s how:
Email
This depends what email client you’re using, but there should generally be a way to do it. In Outlook, you’ll need to go into the File menu, click Options, and open up the Mail tab. Under Tracking, you can untick the Delivery Receipt box (different versions may vary slightly, but it’ll be there-ish). Also, a lot of the time you’ll be asked whether you want to return a read receipt for an individual email, so you can just refuse.
iMessage
Pretty straightforward, this one: open Settings, scroll down to Messages, and then in the Messages setting, toggle the Send Read Receipts switch off.
Facebook
Unhelpfully, there’s no setting in Facebook for hiding that horrible ‘Seen’ status under a message. What you can do, at least on your computer, is install a browser extension that prevents Facebook from doing it – try Unseenly or Facebook Unseen. Adblock Plus will also let you set a custom filter that blocks Facebook from knowing you’ve read messages, but that’s a bit of a faff. Also, there’s nothing you can do about it in the mobile app. Sorry!
Snapchat
Again, nothing you can do about this. Snapchat is the ultimate tattletale, since it also notifies people if you’ve screenshotted their picture, but then the ephemeral nature of Snapchat messages is prety much the point, so it’s probably not worth arguing with.
WhatsApp
WhatsApp’s read receipts used to be non-negotiable, but you can now turn them off – if you’re using Android, anyway. Go into Settings, tap Privacy, and scroll down to untick the box marked Read Receipts. Unfortunately, you can’t turn these off in group chats, so if you use WhatsApp to talk to multiple people simultaneously, you’re still going to see them.