(Credit: WhatsApp)
WhatsApp already supports end-to-end encryption, meaning not even its developer, Meta, can view your chats. So it may surprise you to hear the app is adding an “Incognito” mode focused on keeping your conversations with AI private.
The option could appeal to users worried about companies peeking at their sensitive conversations with AI chatbots. “Incognito Chat with Meta AI is truly private—no one can read your conversation, not even us,” WhatsApp wrote in a blog post.
Chatbot providers, including OpenAI, are known for keeping records of user conversations to train their new AI models. But Meta sees an opportunity to address privacy-conscious users, noting that AI-focused chats “can be deeply sensitive, or include situations where people are including private financial, personal, health, or work data with their questions. In June, for example, Meta updated its Meta AI app to show people a warning prompt before they shared any chats to the public Discover feed.
“When you start an Incognito Chat with Meta AI, you're creating a private, temporary conversation that only you can see,” WhatsApp explains. “Your messages are processed in a secure environment that even Meta cannot access. Your conversations are not saved and by default, your messages disappear—giving you a space to think and explore ideas without anyone watching.”
The company points to a technical white paper with more details about how the “private processing” works for the AI chats. Meta’s approach essentially extends end-to-end encryption from the user’s phone to specialized AMD- and Nvidia-powered servers that host the company’s AI models, while routing the output back to a WhatsApp account in an anonymized fashion.
(Credit: Meta/WhatsApp)“To uphold the principle of confidential processing, we have designed Private Processing in a way that Meta or WhatsApp cannot observe information, such as size of the traffic between the Orchestrator service and any classification models, that could enable inference about the output of any classification models used,” the company adds.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg also chimed in on the feature, saying: “This is the first major AI product where there is no log of your conversations stored on servers.”
“The conversations on your phone also disappear when you exit the session,” he added. “This is different from other disappearing AI products where your conversations logs often remain on other companies' servers for many months.”
Still, Incognito Chat might face scrutiny, as it could shield Meta’s AI from liability, given that chatbots have made headlines for sharing bad advice or even encouraging malicious behavior. Last month, OpenAI’s CEO apologized for failing to warn law enforcement about a woman who talked about gun violence with ChatGPT and later shot and killed eight people in British Columbia, Canada.
In the meantime, WhatsApp plans on expanding the Incognito Chat feature. “In the coming months, we’ll also introduce Side Chat protected by Private Processing. Side Chat with Meta AI will give you private help with any chat, with context of what's being discussed, without disrupting the main conversation,” it says.