Meta, the company currently juggling multiple lawsuits and a string of AI controversies, wants you to chat more privately with its AI on WhatsApp.
WhatsApp just introduced “Incognito Chat” with Meta AI, a new mode that will let you have a completely private conversation with the assistant. Your messages won’t be saved, and they’ll disappear when you close the chat. Meta says nobody, not even Meta itself, can read what you type.
How WhatsApp’s private Meta AI chat will work
People are increasingly turning to AI for questions that are deeply personal, whether that involves financial decisions, health concerns, or sensitive work situations. When the feature rolls out, you’ll get a new icon in your Meta AI chat to start a private, temporary session. Messages will vanish once you close the app or lock your phone.
Meta AI will also lose all context from that chat once the session ends, meaning every incognito conversation will start completely fresh. The feature will gradually roll out across WhatsApp and the standalone Meta AI app over the coming months.
Another feature in the pipeline is Side Chat, which will let you privately ask Meta AI questions within a group conversation without other participants seeing it.
Is Meta AI actually safe to use for private chats?
This is the same Meta AI that was linked to the death of a cognitively impaired man who believed the chatbot was a real woman and traveled to meet her. Meta was also sued by five major publishers, alleging that Meta illegally pirated millions of books and journal articles to train its Llama model.
Science publisher Elsevier separately joined a class-action lawsuit accusing Meta of scraping copyrighted research papers without permission. Whether that changes how you feel about sharing your most personal questions with Meta AI is entirely up to you.
Meanwhile, Meta is also rolling out WhatsApp Plus, a paid subscription charging you for features that competing apps like Telegram already offer for free.