How to Manage Message Privacy on Stitch

Privacy on Stitch is a set of controls, not one switch

People often ask "how do I make Stitch private" as if there were a single toggle. In practice, privacy is a handful of independent settings that each control a different piece of information: who can see when you were last online, whether your messages show as read, who can see your profile photo, and which chats are hidden behind an extra lock. This guide walks through each one so you can set them deliberately instead of guessing.

All of these live in Settings → Privacy & Security, and every one of them can be changed at any time — nothing here is a one-way decision.

Last seen and online status

This controls whether contacts can see the "last seen" timestamp on your profile and whether you appear as active right now. You can set it to Everyone, My Contacts, or Nobody. Choosing Nobody also means you will not see other people's last-seen or online status — it is a mutual setting, the same as on most messaging apps, so hiding your own activity trades away visibility into everyone else's.

Read receipts

Read receipts show the sender when you have actually opened and read their message, rather than just delivered it to your device. Turning this off in Settings → Privacy & Security means your messages will show as delivered instead of read to everyone — and, just like last-seen, you lose the ability to see when others have read your messages in return. This is a good option if you frequently open messages without being ready to reply and would rather not signal that you have seen them.

Profile photo visibility

Separately from last-seen, you can control who sees your profile photo: Everyone, My Contacts, or Nobody. This matters most in group chats with people you do not know personally, or if you use a personal photo you would rather not show to strangers who might add you as a contact.

Blocking versus muting versus restricting

These three controls solve different problems and are easy to mix up. Muting silences notifications from a chat without changing anything about what the other person can do — they can still message you, and you can still see it, just without an alert. Blocking is much stronger: a blocked contact cannot send you new messages or start a new chat, and your profile updates stop being visible to them. Restricting is a lighter-touch middle ground used in some contexts to limit visibility without a full block.

Use mute for "I don't want to be interrupted," and block for "I do not want this person contacting me at all."

Chat Lock: an extra layer for specific conversations

Chat Lock, a Stitch Plus feature, hides individual chats behind your device's own authentication — Face ID, fingerprint, or your device passcode on a phone, or a passkey on the web — so a locked chat does not appear in your main list and its notifications hide the sender and message text. It is a privacy tool for the situation where someone else might glance at your unlocked phone, not a form of message encryption. Read the full guide on how locked chats protect private conversations for the details on locking, unlocking, and the difference between unlocking and resetting.

Disappearing messages: privacy over time

Where the settings above control who can see something, disappearing messages control how long it exists at all. Turning on disappearing messages in a chat (24 hours, 7 days, or 90 days) means new messages sent after that point automatically remove themselves once the timer runs out — useful for conversations you would rather not have sitting in your history indefinitely, like sharing a one-time code or a sensitive detail.

What privacy settings do not do

It is worth being direct about the limits here. Stitch protects your data with standard encryption in transit and at rest, but Stitch is not end-to-end encrypted — these privacy controls govern who can see information through the app's normal interface, not cryptographic guarantees about the underlying data. If you need a precise understanding of what that means, read the Privacy & Safety guide and the Privacy Policy.

A practical starting configuration

If you are setting these up for the first time and are not sure where to start, a reasonable default for most people is: last-seen and profile photo visibility set to My Contacts, read receipts left on unless you specifically want to hide your own read status, and Chat Lock applied only to the specific conversations you would not want visible in a casual glance at your phone. This is not the "most private" configuration possible — Nobody across every setting would be more restrictive — but it balances privacy with the everyday usefulness of a messaging app, which is worth optimizing for rather than maximizing privacy at the cost of the app being pleasant to use.

Revisiting your settings periodically

Privacy needs are not static — a setting that made sense when your contact list was ten close friends may need revisiting once you have accepted dozens of looser acquaintances, coworkers, or people from group chats you barely remember joining. It is worth checking Settings → Privacy & Security every so often, particularly after a period of adding a lot of new contacts, rather than treating your initial setup as permanent. None of these settings are difficult to change, and the cost of checking is a couple of minutes against the benefit of your privacy actually matching your current comfort level.