WhatsApp has very gradually rolled out the Meta AI chatbot within its own app. Since then, the company says that people are increasingly asking “deeply sensitive” questions, involving “private financial, personal, health or work data”. With that in mind, the messaging platform has announced what it calls Incognito Chat for said chatbot. As the name suggests, think of this as the private or incognito mode for it.
The Meta subsidiary says that the Incognito Chat within Meta AI is built using the company’s Private Processing tech. To cut a very long explanation slightly shorter, it’s essentially the end-to-end encryption tech, but applied between your device and a number of Private Processing servers.
Per the company’s explanation, your device is assigned a random server when a session starts. Your queries to the chatbot are then processed in a confidential virtual machine, and can only be accessed by your device and the server assigned to your session. The encryption key between the two is also described as ephemeral. As you’d expect, WhatsApp claims that these Private Processing servers don’t retain access to messages after the session is completed.
As is commonly the case, despite the announcement, WhatsApp says that the rollout of Incognito Chat with Meta AI will be a gradual one. On that note, users will be granted access to it over the coming months.
And on another related note, the messaging platform also says that it intends to announce what it calls Side Chat, also in the coming months. The company says that this one will have the Private Processing protections, but is context-aware of what’s being discussed. This sounds like something that you invoke while in a chat with someone else, rather than directly via the Meta AI chatbot. That will naturally take even longer before everyone gets access.
