WhatsApp and Meta AI introduce incognito mode for private chats

Meta announced on Wednesday that WhatsApp and the standalone Meta AI app will soon offer an incognito mode for conversations with its AI chatbot. These incognito chats are processed in a secure environment, are not saved, and messages disappear by default when the chat is closed, the app is closed, or the phone is locked. Meta AI loses context of the conversation upon session end. Users can start an incognito session by tapping a new icon in one-on-one Meta AI chats. The feature will roll out over the next few months. Alice Newton-Rex, VP of Product at WhatsApp, stated that people use AI for private thoughts on financial or health questions, and Meta aims to provide privacy. The incognito mode uses Meta's latest Muse Spark model, released last month, and builds on private processing infrastructure detailed last year that preserves end-to-end encryption. Meta is also developing a feature called Side Chat, which lets users privately invoke Meta AI within group chats without notifying other participants. Currently, users must tag a message to ask the AI in a group chat, or paste text into a separate window for private queries. Competitors like ChatGPT, Claude, DuckDuckGo, and Proton already offer incognito or privacy-first chatbots. Reuters reported last month that lawyers opined users' AI chatbot conversations could be used against them in litigation.