There is no button to hide that you have Telegram from your contacts, instead, you have to adjust a series of parameters within the application to avoid precisely this and that they can contact you from this messaging application. It’s about preventing you from showing up to them.
The same happens in WhatsApp, that is, there is no magic button that allows you not to appear to contacts who also use the apps, although there are a series of somewhat more cumbersome procedures to prevent them from seeing you on WhatsApp, but they are easy to run.
Focusing on Telegram, we have to enable some parameters in the application settings, so we will have to do them one by one to reach the final task, where we want the contacts not to know that we have an account in this app.
Hide phone number
The first thing to do is hide your phone number from everyone who joins Telegram, that is, they won’t know who you are. This setting is activated as follows:
- Enter Telegram and go to the settings, inside navigate to privacy and security/phone number.
- In the top options, check the “nobody” box. When you check this option, you will see that another call appears just below “you can find me by my number” and there you will have to select “my contacts”. This means that only those who add your number and are also your contact will be able to see you on Telegram, otherwise, you will remain hidden from other people.
Change or hide your profile picture
It may seem silly, but hiding your profile picture allows you to “mislead” your contacts so they don’t know it’s you. In this case, you can do two things, put one that is not your face or simply show it for your contacts or for none of those you have.
To modify the photo of your Telegram profile do the following:
- Open Telegram and enter the settings.
- Then click on “edit” at the top.
- Now click on “put a new photo or video” and add the new image or clip. Then you click on ready and that’s it.
If what you want is to hide your profile photo, these would be the steps to follow:
- In the Telegram settings, go to “profile photo” and there you select the “my contacts” option.
If you prefer, you can add that certain of your contacts cannot see it by adding them in the “do not share with” section.
Delete synced contacts
By default, your contacts are synchronized with Telegram, so what we are going to do is delete all those synchronized contacts and also prevent them from synchronizing in the future, for which you would have to do the following:
- In Telegram for iOS, access settings/privacy and security/data settings.
- Click on “delete synchronized contacts” and confirm yes and then click uncheck the box below.
The most radical option would be to delete those Telegram contacts that you do not want to know that you have a profile in the app, but the downside of this is that they will also be deleted from your mobile phone book, so you must take that into account.
You could also block all your Telegram contacts before deleting it by entering each chat with each one of them, clicking on their profile image and then on the option “block”, but you would have to do it one by one and if you have a lot it is not a too viable option, in addition, they can know if someone has blocked them on Telegram.