Meta plans to increase privacy for its users, especially for its social messaging application “Whatsapp”.
Mark Zuckerberg’s established tech giant WhatsApp is rolling out a new “secret chat” feature to its artificial intelligence assistant on messaging service, the company said on Wednesday, as it looks to address data privacy concerns.
Meta said the secret chats will be powered by its private processing technology, ensuring that conversations will remain invisible to anyone, including the company.
WhatsApp’s new “secret feature”
“Your conversations aren’t saved, and by default, your messages disappear – giving you the chance to think and explore ideas without anyone seeing you,” the company said in a blog post.
The move comes as people often share sensitive personal, financial, health or work-related information with AI assistants, despite privacy concerns about how their data may be stored or used by companies.
“We’re starting to ask a lot of meaningful questions about our lives with AI systems. It doesn’t always feel like you should be sharing the information behind those questions with the companies that run those AI systems,” WhatsApp chief Will Cathcart said in a media briefing.
According to a company website, the messages people share with Meta AI can be used by the social media company to improve its AI models, but individual chats on WhatsApp remain protected by end-to-end encryption and are not accessible for that purpose.
For now, secret chats are text-only, Cathcart said, meaning users won’t be able to upload images.
He said the AI ​​would also have built-in safety guardrails, refusing to answer problematic questions or taking the conversation in different directions.
Meta said it also plans to introduce “side chat” with Meta AI in the coming months, a feature that will allow users to get personal assistance in any chat on WhatsApp.
