Meta announced Wednesday that it is adding the ability to start “secret” conversations with the Meta AI chatbot within WhatsApp. The company says these conversations will be handled in a secure environment and will not be seen by anyone.
Users can start a secret session by tapping a new icon in a one-on-one chat with Meta AI. The company says this feature will also be available in the standalone Meta AI app.
Secret Chats will roll out to WhatsApp and Meta AI apps in the coming months.
Mehta said these secret conversations are not saved and the messages disappear by default when you close the chat. Closing the app or locking your phone also ends your session, and Meta AI loses the context of that particular conversation, the company said.
“People are starting to use AI for everything, including their most private thoughts, whether it’s tackling questions about money or health or asking for advice on how to respond to a troubling message from a friend or colleague. We think it’s critical that people be able to ask these questions as privately as possible,” Alice Newton-Rex, WhatsApp’s vice president of product, told TechCrunch by phone.
The company has been laying the foundation for secure AI chat on WhatsApp for some time. Last year, the company detailed its private processing infrastructure that allows it to build AI capabilities without breaking end-to-end encryption. Since then, WhatsApp has added features such as AI-powered message summarization using this architecture.
Newton-Rex said Meta used a smaller model to power its previous features, but the new Secret Chat uses the latest Muse Spark model released last month.
The company is already working on upcoming features that leverage private processing infrastructure. This feature, called Side Chat, allows users to invoke Meta AI within a chat to ask questions and get answers privately, without notifying or showing others in the chat.
Currently, you must tag your message to ask the AI assistant a question to get an answer that can be seen by other participants in the chat. If you need to ask a personal question, you’ll need to paste the text into a separate chat window.
ChatGPT and Claude also offer incognito modes, and companies like DuckDuckGo and Proton are launching their own privacy-focused chatbots.
Meta’s move into private AI chat comes at a critical time. Last month, Reuters cited a lawyer’s opinion that users’ conversations with AI chatbots could be used in lawsuits.
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