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WhatsApp said on Wednesday it is launching an AI chat function known as Incognito Chat that is built to allow users to converse privately with Meta AI—such that Meta itself cannot access the questions or answers. The feature is based on WhatsApp's Private Processing scheme, which debuted a year ago and already underlies WhatsApp's existing AI features, including message summarization and composition tools.
The idea of Incognito Chat is to create a way for WhatsApp to offer AI chat integration that does not conflict with the communication platform's commitment to end-to-end encryption, the privacy scheme in which only direct participants in a conversation can read messages or hear a call. Most generative AI platforms now offer some type of “incognito mode,” but these features are usually designed to separate users from the questions they ask and the answers they receive rather than including a mechanism to entirely shield those questions and answers from the provider's view. With Incognito Chat, WhatsApp will only be able to see that an account used the feature, according to Meta.
Meta invites third-party audits and vulnerability reports on Private Processing and says Incognito Chat itself is going to be subject to expert oversight so third parties can verify that code Meta ships for the feature is durable. But as with any cloud system, chatting with Meta AI on WhatsApp will ultimately involve trusting Meta in the same way using WhatsApp for communication does.
“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 tells 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.”
Incognito chats are ephemeral by default and will disappear once your conversation is over. Cathcart says that WhatsApp may work on developing an option within Private Processing to retain some or all of these conversations over time for users who want that history. And for now, Incognito Chat is text-only. Cathcart says support for image processing and voice recognition is in the works. Reducing latency in any way possible, including by optimizing routing, has been key to making Incognito Chat usable given the extra demands of running AI within the secure cloud environment of Private Processing.
“Incognito Chat handles all AI inference in a Trusted Execution Environment that ensures your messages are not accessible to us,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a post on 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.”
Meta is also adding Incognito Chat as an option in the Meta AI app.
Another feature announced on Wednesday alongside Incognito Chat is “Side Chat with Meta AI,” which integrates the ability to essentially DM with Meta AI about a text chat you're having with another person or group of people. The idea is to give users a way to ask AI for restaurant suggestions or about a movie your friends are discussing without essentially leaking these locations or interests to a company.
“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 says.
Incognito Chat includes a feature that will be on by default but can be turned off to allow its AI model to search the web in an anonymized way for up-to-date information.
With more than 3 billion users around the world, Incognito Chat may offer many people their first opportunity to interact with an AI chatbot. So the fact that it is built to be privacy preserving is significant.
“It's AI that runs inside Meta's hardware security modules,” says Matt Green, a Johns Hopkins cryptographer who provided input about Private Processing. He says Meta described the Incognito Chat system to him and has kept him updated on its progress. “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.”
Green and others have pointed out previously, though, that any secure cloud-based solution simply has trade-offs because the system becomes a prominent and incredibly valuable target for attackers. And, as is already the case for financial services and other systems that require secrecy, the stakes are extremely high in a platform where users are assuming a high level of privacy and potentially sharing deeply personal information.
Zuckerberg wrote on Wednesday that he is “proud that [Meta Superintelligence Labs] is the first lab to deliver private AI.” And Meta does seem to have a focus on private AI, at least for now. But the company is, of course, still a behemoth with many often competing priorities. This week, Meta entirely eliminated opt-in end-to-end encryption from Instagram Direct Messages after promising for years that it would roll out default end-to-end encryption on Instagram chat.
