The company launched Incognito Chat with Meta AI, a feature that lets users hold AI conversations the platform itself cannot read. The rollout will reach WhatsApp and the standalone Meta AI app over the coming months.
How Incognito Chat works
Incognito Chat runs on top of Meta’s Private Processing technology, the same infrastructure the company introduced earlier for AI tools in WhatsApp. Messages sent through an Incognito Chat are handled inside a secure environment that Meta cannot access. Conversations are not stored on Meta’s servers, and individual messages disappear by default, leaving no record on the user’s account once a session ends.
The setup means a user can ask Meta AI about a health concern, a legal question, or a confidential work document with the same level of confidentiality WhatsApp offers for person-to-person chats. WhatsApp connected the move to the tenth anniversary of its rollout of end-to-end encryption, describing Incognito Chat as an extension of that protection into AI interactions.
Side Chat coming next
“In the coming months, we’ll also introduce Side Chat protected by Private Processing. Side Chat with Meta AI will give you private help with any chat, with context of what’s being discussed, without disrupting the main conversation,” Meta said.
Privacy stakes for AI on messaging platforms
The launch lands at a moment when regulators in the European Union, the United States, and parts of Asia are examining how AI assistants handle user data, particularly when those assistants are embedded in services billing themselves as private. WhatsApp counts more than two billion users, and the inclusion of Meta AI in the app last year drew attention from privacy advocates and data protection authorities concerned about how prompts and responses would be processed.
By keeping prompts inaccessible to Meta, Incognito Chat addresses one of the most common objections raised against AI features inside encrypted messaging apps. A technical whitepaper detailing the Private Processing architecture behind the feature is available through Meta’s AI documentation site.
