WhatsApp has announced incognito mode for its built-in Meta AI chatbot, letting users ask personal, sensitive questions away from the prying eyes of others and data providers.
According to Meta, WhatsApp’s Incognito Chat with Meta AI is truly private, in that even WhatsApp itself has no access to your incognito mode conversations with Meta AI. The company claims it is unlike other options, in which AI providers can still see active incognito chats, even if they do not retain that information or train their AI models on the data within.
WhatsApp’s Meta AI incognito mode in a nutshell.
Image: WhatsApp (Meta)
This works well for questions you feel that nobody should have access to because it’s weird or intrusive, like asking about a rash that recently appeared, or having to explain to people why you want a second or third opinion on a matter you’re obsessed with.
Incognito Mode appears as an option within your Meta AI chat window, and you can flit in and out of the mode during the course of a conversation. However, the queries and responses in Incognito Mode do not carry over to your regular Meta AI conversations (that’s the whole point of having the mode). Similarly, you will lose the conversation as soon as you exit Meta AI’s chatbot.
Meta said the AI is already pretrained with safeguards, so Incognito Mode doesn’t mean it will suddenly be able to answer inappropriate questions from equally questionable characters. It just doesn’t save your chat with the AI.
