Facebook’s infamous privacy policy once cast a dark light on its messaging app, and yet it remains one of the most popular communication tools out there. Compared to most messaging apps, it falls far short when it comes to being able to read chat messages without the sender’s knowledge.

If you’re someone who likes to think about a message before giving a proper response, Facebook Messenger options may seem sparse. But there are a few ways you can read chat messages without triggering the read receipt for the sender. Here’s all about them.

Once you open a chat on Facebook Messenger, the messages in the chat are marked as read. Unlike other messenger apps, Facebook doesn’t let you turn off read receipts for messages you’ve opened.

You may see an option to mark a chat as unread when you long-press it, but this doesn’t actually remove the read receipt. It’s just a tool to help you sort your Messenger chats more easily, nothing more. So basically, there’s no real way to read messages without the other person knowing natively. Unless you use the methods below.