Meta Platforms announced Wednesday the introduction of a private chat feature for WhatsApp’s artificial intelligence assistant, responding to mounting concerns about user privacy when interacting with AI technology.
The tech giant detailed in a company blog post that this incognito feature allows WhatsApp users to engage in confidential, temporary discussions with Meta AI, the company’s artificial intelligence helper that has been integrated into the messaging platform for several years.
According to Meta, conversations conducted through this private mode will be handled within a protected system that remains inaccessible even to the company itself, with messages automatically deleted upon session completion rather than being stored.
Privacy issues have long plagued artificial intelligence platforms because the sophisticated language systems powering these tools rely on enormous datasets for training, which can sometimes incorporate sensitive user information from previous chatbot interactions.
Competing AI services have already implemented similar privacy protections. Google’s Gemini platform offers users the ability to turn off conversation history and prevent their data from being used in model training, while ChatGPT provides comparable privacy controls.
Meta explained that the private chat option was developed because users frequently pose sensitive queries to chatbots or include confidential financial, medical, personal, or professional information in their interactions.
“We’re starting ask a lot of meaningful questions about our lives with AI systems, and it doesn’t always feel like you should have to share the information behind those questions with the companies that run those AI systems,” Will Cathcart, Meta’s head of WhatsApp, told reporters.
The private chat feature includes built-in safety measures designed to prevent the AI from responding to harmful or inappropriate topics, according to Cathcart.
The system will “steer the user towards helpful information if it can and then refuse (to answer) and eventually even just stop interacting with the user completely,” Cathcart said.
The private mode will be limited to text-based interactions only, preventing users from uploading or creating images. Additionally, age verification will be required since Meta prohibits users under 13 from accessing its services.
