Privacy policy
No server. Nothing collected.
Last updated 5 September 2026 · applies to Stay Unseen 1.0.5
Stay Unseen is a browser extension that stops Instagram and Facebook from reporting that you have viewed a story, read a message, or started typing a reply.
The short version
Stay Unseen has no server. It does not collect, transmit, sell, or share any information about you with anyone, including its developer. Everything it records stays inside your own copy of your browser, and uninstalling the extension deletes all of it.
What Stay Unseen stores on your device
All of the following is kept in the browser's local extension storage
(storage.local). None of it is ever sent anywhere.
| What | Why |
|---|---|
| Six on/off settings, one per blocking feature | So your toggles survive a restart |
| A count of blocked signals per feature | Powers the counter and the toolbar badge |
| The last 20 blocked requests — URL, feature, timestamp | Powers the diagnostics panel in the popup, so you can confirm the extension is working |
| The last 30 candidate requests and 20 websocket frames, with message text removed | Lets the popup show you which signals it detected, so a signal that stopped being blocked can be diagnosed |
The stored URLs are the endpoints Stay Unseen saw or blocked on instagram.com, facebook.com and messenger.com. They are held only so the popup can show you what it just did, they are capped and overwritten continuously, and they are readable only by this extension on this device.
Clearing the counters in the popup, or uninstalling the extension, erases all of the above.
Reading request contents
To decide whether a request is a read receipt or a typing notification, Stay Unseen has to look at more than the address: on Instagram and Messenger these signals are sent as GraphQL calls and websocket frames whose addresses are identical to ordinary ones. So the extension inspects the outgoing request body in memory, matches it against a fixed list of patterns, and then either blocks it or lets it through.
Two consequences worth stating plainly:
- On a chat site, outgoing bodies include messages you send. Stay Unseen looks at them only to make that block/allow decision, and never keeps or sends them.
-
Before anything is written to the diagnostics lists above, the fields that hold
text you typed are replaced with
<user_text>. This is also what stops a message containing the word “typing” from being mistaken for a typing signal and dropped.
What Stay Unseen does not do
- It does not have a server, so there is nothing to send data to.
- It does not use analytics, telemetry, crash reporting, or advertising.
- It does not transmit your messages, photos, contacts, posts, or account details, and does not store the text of your messages.
- It does not ask for an account, an email address, or a sign-in.
- It does not track your browsing. It cannot: it has permission to run on instagram.com, facebook.com and messenger.com only, and no access whatsoever to any other website.
- It does not sell or share information with third parties, because it does not collect any.
What it does on the sites it runs on
On Instagram, Facebook and Messenger only, Stay Unseen blocks the specific network requests that report a story view, a message read, or that you are typing. It does this in two ways: by cancelling those requests at the network layer, and by intercepting the equivalent calls made by the page's own code. It does not modify the pages you are looking at.
Your control
Every blocking feature has its own toggle in the popup and can be turned off at any
time. Turning a feature off restores the site's normal behaviour immediately.
Removing the extension from your browser's extensions page —
chrome://extensions, edge://extensions, or
about:addons — stops all of its activity and deletes its stored data.
Children
Stay Unseen is not directed at children under 13 and collects no information from anyone, including children.
Changes to this policy
If the extension's data handling changes, this page will be updated and the date at the top revised before the change ships.
Contact
Questions about this policy: hrrpooh@gmail.com
Affiliation
Stay Unseen is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Meta Platforms, Instagram, Facebook, or Microsoft.