How to Protect Your Chats from Prying Eyes

Whether you’re organizing a surprise party, planning a marriage proposal, or running a diary note group, sometimes there are messages or chats that are not meant for prying eyes. In Threema, these chats can be marked as private and even hidden from the chat overview.

Have you ever organized a surprise party for someone? It’s not easy to pull something off without the person finding out, especially when lots of people are involved. The larger the group, the greater the risk that the person you’re trying to surprise will see a message on someone else’s phone and find out about the surprise.

Effective Secrecy Feature

In situations like these, where individual chat histories are particularly confidential and intended for your eyes only, they can be protected in the Threema app with a code, Face ID, or your fingerprint. In private chats, neither the sender’s name nor a preview of the message will be displayed in push notifications.

How to mark chats as private:

• Android: First, activate the desired protection mechanism in “Settings > Security.” Then, tap and hold the relevant chat and select “Mark as private chat.”

• iOS: First, go to “Settings > Passcode Lock” and set a passcode to protect your private chats. Then, swipe right on the relevant chat and tap the lock icon.

Once a chat is marked as private, it can only be opened with the passcode, Face ID, or fingerprint.

To ensure that no one can read your private chats, you can also hide them from the chat overview. To do this, tap on “⋮” and then on “Hide Private Chats” (Android), or activate the “Hide Private Chats” option in “Settings > Privacy” (iOS). To display the chats again, simply deactivate the option.

With the combination of locking and hiding chats, Threema offers a simple way to keep confidential conversations secure.