Meta Platforms has announced the rollout of a new Incognito Chat feature for its AI assistant on WhatsApp. The update is designed to address growing user anxiety regarding data privacy and the handling of sensitive information by artificial intelligence models.
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According to Meta, Incognito Chats are powered by a proprietary private processing technology that ensures conversations remain entirely invisible to outside parties, including Meta itself.
- No Long-Term Storage: Conversations are not saved on Meta’s servers, and messages disappear by default once the session concludes.
- Data Insulation: Unlike standard interactions with Meta AI, which the company utilizes to train and improve its machine learning models, data from Incognito Chats is completely excluded from model training.
Will Cathcart, Head of WhatsApp, emphasized during a media briefing that as users increasingly turn to AI with deeply personal, financial, health, or work-related queries, they should not feel forced to compromise their privacy. While Meta AI interactions become private under this mode, standard personal chats between WhatsApp users continue to be protected by the platform’s default end-to-end encryption.
In its initial release, Incognito Chat will operate with a few functional guardrails:
- Text-Only Format: Users are restricted to text inputs and will not be able to upload images or documents into private AI sessions for the time being.
- Content Moderation: The system retains its core safety protocols, meaning the AI will refuse to answer problematic or unsafe prompts, actively steering conversations away from prohibited topics.
Looking ahead, Meta revealed plans to launch Side Chat within the coming months. This upcoming feature will allow WhatsApp users to summon the Meta AI assistant quietly within any existing personal or group thread to receive private contextual assistance without disrupting the flow of the main conversation.
