If you have another Facebook account, you will automatically have a Messenger account. Whether you realize it or not, Messenger is one of the most popular apps in the world. (I only use it to sell all my personal belongings on Marketplace, but it has other features.) Here are the best features to enable for increased privacy and convenience.
When you tap your profile photo in the top left corner, the settings menu come up. You can use it to turn on the dark mode for those late night messaging sessions. Also in this menu is ‘Active status’, which you can turn off so other people can not see if you are online, or the last time you logged in.
Scroll down to “Privacy” and select “Delivery of Messages.” Allows you to customize who can send you a message in the app – just your Facebook friends, anyone with your phone number, etc. You can then decide whether the messages come directly to your inbox as chats or as easy to ignore. Select “Phone Contacts” under the “Preferences” section to control the data the app retrieves from your address book.
Once you are in a conversation, click on the photo of the other participant and scroll down to “Go to secret conversation.” It will pop up a new chat that offers end-to-end encryption and disappearing messages. If you just pull up with a regular conversation, you can enable “Disappear Mode”, which will still make your messages disappear, but without the extra coding. Be aware though – Vanish Mode notifies all attendees when someone takes a conversation on the screenshot.