There are a variety of reasons why you would wish to conceal messages from your iPhone, particularly alerts that appear when your phone is locked. Perhaps you don’t like the thought of outsiders seeing your text messages as they appear on your iPhone.
It just takes a few seconds to conceal SMS, WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, and other notifications for whatever reason. It’s also simple enough to conceal particular text message chains or the messages from a single sender.
You may hide message notifications so they never display on your lock screen, hide your actual message chain in a file where no one is likely to check, or switch to a new messaging app with scheduled text deletion and app password security.
We’ll go over each message privacy option and so on until you find the ones that work best for you.
Hiding the message notifications on iPhones
Scroll down to your preferred messaging app in Settings > Notifications. To keep your privacy, go to its unique notification settings and look for the following options:
- Allow notifications: If you turn this off, you won’t get any alerts from this app, so you’ll have to check the app to see if you’ve gotten a message.
- Alerts: You may keep notifications turned on but turn off the Lock Screen option to view only the message alert in your Notification Center.
- Show Previews: By turning on lock screen alerts, you may guarantee that they can only be viewed by you after unlocking your phone with Face ID, or that they will never be unlocked.
- Sounds: Use this menu to turn off the app’s default alert tone and vibration so your phone doesn’t give it away when it sends you a text.
You might just want to hide the alert alerts for one discussion. This will differ from app to app, but it’s quite simple with Apple Messages. Toggle the Hide Alerts option by opening the chat, tapping the profile symbol at the top, tapping Info, and then tapping the profile icon again.
Hiding a conversation from Apple Messages
Hide notifications from a single contact works to some level, but if someone else unlocks your phone, the text discussion will still be completely accessible in-app, especially if you contacted that person lately.
The simplest approach to conceal a communication is to erase it. To access the trash icon, either tap and hold a Messages conversation or swipe from right to left. Then, to confirm that you wish to delete it, touch the red trash symbol.
Back up your iPhone to your computer and then use the Decipher Textmessage software for Mac or Windows to save your texts before they are deleted. It reads your iPhone/ iPad backup and saves your chat as a PDF, plain text version, multimedia version with images and video, or a variety of other formats.
If you don’t want to erase the conversation but still want to text this individual, your best option is to delete their contact information from your address book. Then go to Settings > Messages and select Message Filtering from the drop-down menu. Filter Unknown Senders can be toggled there.
This option is suggested for individuals seeking to block text messages on iPhones since it separates possible spam into a distinct, filtered folder and disables any alerts from it, similar to how a spam folder on your email works.
Filter Unknown Senders, on the other hand, provides another privacy purpose: because you’ve removed this individual from your contacts list, their messages won’t trigger alerts and will only be accessible in a folder where no one would think to look.
Using an iOS messaging app that is more private
Apple Messages was created with accessibility and convenience in mind, not with privacy in mind. Instead of relying on workarounds and features that are disabled, you might consider moving to a new app that promotes privacy.
End-to-end encryption is available in messaging applications like Signal and Telegram, ensuring that your communications cannot be intercepted. More crucially for the sake of this article, they allow you to password secure the app itself, ensuring that anyone who knows your phone password cannot read your private messages.
In case you’re concerned about privacy on another person’s phone, both Telegram and Signal allow you to send messages that auto-delete on the receiver’s end. Telegram even allows you to delete every message you’ve sent to another person from both your phone and theirs, ensuring that no trace of your communication is left behind.
