Meta announced on Wednesday that it is adding the ability to start “incognito” conversations with its Meta AI chatbot within WhatsApp. These conversations, the company said, will be conducted in a secure environment and will not be visible to anyone.
Users can start an incognito session by tapping on a new icon in one-on-one conversations with Meta AI. The company said the feature will also be available in the standalone Meta AI app.
Anonymous chats will roll out to WhatsApp and the Meta AI app in the coming months.
Meta said that these anonymous chats are not saved and the messages will disappear by default once you close the chat. The session will also end if you close the app or lock your phone, and Meta AI will lose the context of that conversation, the company said.
“People are starting to use AI for everything, including some of their most personal thoughts, whether it’s financial or health questions, or advice on how to respond to a difficult message from a friend or colleague. We think it’s really important to empower people to ask these questions as privately as possible,” said Alice Newton-Rex, VP of Productunchr at WhatsApp.
The company has been laying the groundwork for secure AI chats on WhatsApp for a while now. Last year, it detailed its private processing infrastructure that would allow it to create AI features without breaking end-to-end encryption. Since then, WhatsApp has added features like AI-powered message summaries that use this architecture.
Newton-Rex said Meta used smaller models to power its previous features, but the new incognito chat uses its latest Muse Spark model, which launched last month.
The company is already working on its next feature that leverages its private processing infrastructure. Called Side Chat, it will allow users to invoke Meta AI within chats to ask questions and receive answers privately without alerting or showing it to other people in the chat.
Currently, you have to tag a message and ask the AI assistant a question to get a response that other chat participants can see. If you need to ask a question privately, you need to paste the text into a separate chat window.
ChatGPT and Claude also offer incognito features, as do the companies DuckDuckGo and Proton have launched their own privacy chatbots.
Meta’s move toward private AI conversations comes at a defining moment. Last month, Reuters cited lawyers who believed that users conversations with an AI chatbot could be used against them in dispute.
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