“A big part of our work at WhatsApp relates to when there’s a perfect solution that’s very hard to use—how do you give people other options that still bring them the privacy benefits?” WhatsApp head Will Cathcart told WIRED. “With AI, from a privacy standpoint, you’d want to run everything on your own phone, but the benefit of these models is using larger and larger compute to make them work. So the challenge is how do you build something in a data center that’s not going to fit in your pocket but has the same types of security properties. Incognito Chat is kind of like we’re running a giant phone for AI and we don’t have the passcode.”
Meta says Incognito Chat conversations disappear automatically after a session ends, making the chats ephemeral by default. The feature currently supports only text-based interactions, though Cathcart said image processing and voice recognition are already being developed. He also said WhatsApp may eventually allow users to preserve some chat history through Private Processing for those who want persistent conversations. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg described the feature as a privacy-focused approach to AI interaction inside WhatsApp and Meta AI.
“Incognito Chat handles all AI inference in a Trusted Execution Environment that ensures your messages are not accessible to us,” Zuckerberg wrote Wednesday. “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.”
Alongside Incognito Chat, Meta also introduced a related feature called Side Chat with Meta AI. The tool allows users to privately ask Meta AI questions about conversations taking place in individual or group chats without uploading screenshots or manually copying messages into a separate chatbot. Meta says the feature could help users ask for restaurant suggestions, get summaries of busy group chats, or look up information connected to discussions happening inside WhatsApp conversations.
“It’s sensitive information, and you should’t have to screenshot a conversation and upload it to a regular chatbot to be able to ask a question about what a friend is talking about or get an AI summary of what’s been said in a big group chat,” Cathcart said.
Incognito Chat also includes optional web search functionality that allows the AI model to retrieve current information through anonymized searches. The feature is enabled by default but can be turned off by users. Meta says it will allow third-party audits and vulnerability reporting tied to Private Processing and Incognito Chat, and the company has involved outside cryptographers and security researchers in reviewing the system’s design.
Matt Green, a Johns Hopkins cryptographer who advised on Private Processing, said he believes the system can deliver private AI conversations even though it still relies on cloud infrastructure. “It’s AI that runs inside Meta’s hardware security modules,” Green said. “I have confidence that if you want to talk to an AI without anyone else seeing your conversation, including Meta, this will do the job.”
The rollout comes as Meta continues expanding AI products across its platforms while facing ongoing scrutiny around privacy and encryption. Earlier this week, the company removed opt-in end-to-end encryption from Instagram Direct Messages after previously promising encrypted messaging would become the default experience on Instagram.
This analysis is based on reporting from WIRED.
Image courtesy of Meta.
This article was generated with AI assistance and reviewed for accuracy and quality.
