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WhatsApp now lets you have incognito conversations with Meta AI

WhatsApp and the Meta AI app now let users turn on incognito mode when having sensitive conversations with Meta AI. Here’s what that means and how to use it.

Feature is rolling out on WhatsApp and the Meta AI app

Earlier today, Mark Zuckerberg announced on Threads that users can now activate Incognito Chat with Meta AI on both WhatsApp and the Meta AI app.

In essence, this feature turns the conversation into an ephemeral chat, meaning it disappears as soon as the user leaves. Most chatbots, including ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude, already offer a similar feature.

WhatsApp and Meta AI’s new Incognito Chat are also protected with Private Processing, which, in a nutshell, means that Meta can’t access it.

Here’s Mark Zuckerberg:

Incognito Chat handles all AI inference in a Trusted Execution Environment that ensures your messages are not accessible to us. The conversations on your phone also disappear when you exit the session. This is different from other disappearing AI products where your conversations logs often remain on other companies’ servers for many months.

Meta launched Private Processing last year as a way to bring AI features to WhatsApp without giving Meta or WhatsApp access to users’ private messages.

It sends requests to a protected cloud environment, where the AI model can process them without the contents being visible to Meta, and deletes the data once the request is complete. You can learn more about Private Processing here.

Back to the feature, Meta says that in addition to keeping the content of the chat private and having it disappear once the user leaves the conversation, Incognito Chat also protects web searches made during the conversation:

Even web search is private
Meta Al asks search engines to find up-to-date results using search terms based on your chat, without linking searches to you.

Incognito Chat is rolling out today, and you can learn more about it here.

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Avatar for Marcus Mendes Marcus Mendes

Marcus Mendes is a Brazilian tech podcaster and journalist who has been closely following Apple since the mid-2000s.

He began covering Apple news in Brazilian media in 2012 and later broadened his focus to the wider tech industry, hosting a daily podcast for seven years.