I hope someone can help me as this is puzzling me.
Although I don’t use Messenger (or Facebook) that often, I decided to sort out all the privacy settings properly once and for all. Facebook was already set up to highest settings and the Chat function is Off on all devices I log onto.
I only use Messenger on my phone and my Active status is turned off.
According to all my google searches, based on the above, nobody should see me as Active and I shouldn’t see anybody else’s Active either.
Which is sort of true, in that the Active list in my Messenger is empty.
In reality (and this is how my questions came about), if I select one of my Messenger contacts and they happen to be Active, I can see the green dot and their status as Active. If they are not active at the time, Messenger tells me they were Active X hours ago.
I understand they might be (or have been) Active on Facebook or Messenger, no way of telling and it doesn’t really matter.
So, does this mean that despite my Active status being turned off in Messenger (and my Chat off in Facebook on all devices I use) others can still see my Active or Last Active status?
All this is puzzling me. I only discovered the Active function by accident and it annoyed me because some of my Messenger contacts were randoms (not Facebook friends) from Facebook Marketplace or local groups. It took me a while to realise these people (decent as they may be) were listed in my Messenger contacts to start with, which is obvious (doh!). Then it took me a while to realise we can see each other’s Active statuses. Took me further still to remove them from my Contacts list one by one because I simply don’t want them there.
My first question: will my own name still show as a contact in the Messenger of these non-Facebook friends after I removed them from my own contacts? And if so, will they continue to see my Active status?
My second question: if my own Active status is Off, do any of my Messenger contacts (friends and non-friends within Facebook) still get to see my own Active status if, as I mentioned above, I can still see theirs when looking at individual contact details, despite the fact that Messenger claim that when my own Active is turned off I can’t see anyone else’s anymore.
I still want to use Messenger and I will still have random contacts on there from time to time. Now I know I can remove them but I don’t want them to see anything about me during the short messages exchange and after I remove them from my contacts list; and I don’t want to see anything about them either as regards this Active status malarkey.
My actual phone contacts are not imported in Messenger, if that makes any difference.
Sorry it’s such a long post and thank you if you read thus far. I’ve been trying to get this clear in my head for ages and there isn’t a clear online answer that makes any sense to me.