Meta announced on Wednesday the introduction of "incognito" conversation capabilities for its Meta AI chatbot within WhatsApp. The company stated that these interactions will be handled in a secure environment, ensuring complete privacy and invisibility to any third parties.
Users will be able to initiate an incognito session by selecting a newly introduced icon within their one-on-one chats with Meta AI. This feature is also slated for availability on the dedicated Meta AI application.
The rollout of incognito chats to both WhatsApp and the Meta AI app is anticipated to occur over the coming months.
Meta clarified that these private conversations are not retained; messages will vanish by default upon closing the chat window. Furthermore, the session will terminate if the user closes the application or locks their phone, resulting in Meta AI losing the contextual understanding of that specific interaction.
"Individuals are increasingly leveraging AI for a wide array of purposes, including their most sensitive considerations, ranging from financial and health inquiries to seeking advice on crafting responses to challenging messages from friends or colleagues," stated Alice Newton-Rex, VP of Product at WhatsApp, during a call with TechCrunch. She emphasized, "We think it’s really important to give people the ability to ask these questions as privately as possible."
This initiative builds upon Meta's ongoing efforts to establish a secure foundation for AI-powered interactions within WhatsApp. Last year, the company unveiled its private processing infrastructure, specifically designed to enable AI feature development without compromising end-to-end encryption. This architecture has already been utilized for existing features such as AI-powered message summaries.
Newton-Rex further clarified that while previous features relied on smaller models, the new incognito chat functionality is powered by Meta's most recent Muse Spark model, which debuted just last month.
Meta is already developing its subsequent feature, "Side Chat," which will also leverage this private processing infrastructure. Side Chat will enable users to discreetly invoke Meta AI directly within existing chat conversations, allowing them to ask questions and receive private answers without alerting or displaying the interaction to other participants in the chat.
Presently, engaging the AI assistant for a visible response requires tagging a message and posing a question, which is then viewable by all chat participants. To obtain a private answer, users must typically copy and paste the text into a separate chat window.
This move aligns with broader industry trends, as services like ChatGPT and Claude already provide incognito modes, and companies such as DuckDuckGo and Proton have introduced their own privacy-centric chatbots.
Meta's emphasis on private AI conversations arrives at a particularly opportune moment. Last month, Reuters reported on legal experts who voiced concerns that user interactions with AI chatbots could potentially be admissible and used against them in legal proceedings.
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