Meta AI goes Incognito: Here’s what you need to know

People now ask AI everything. Private medical questions. Salary negotiations. Financial struggles. Tax strategies. But until today, users had no way to hide these conversations.

Meta is closing that gap with Incognito Chat with Meta AI, a new mode where your AI conversations become genuinely invisible, not even Meta employees can read them.

What Incognito Chat does?

Incognito Chat, rolling out on WhatsApp and the Meta AI app, works differently from competitors' privacy modes. Other platforms claim "incognito" status while company servers still process your messages.

Meta's version processes chats in a secure environment the company itself cannot access. Messages don't save. They vanish by default. You're left with a temporary conversation thread only you see.

This feature is based on Meta’s Private Processing technology, which is the same platform over which the company has built its ten-year-old encryption technology for the app.

The adoption of AI by individuals has progressed at a rate faster than that of the privacy technology infrastructure. Individuals send financial information to chatbots. Others have been describing symptoms of diseases with their personal AI assistants. Individuals brainstorm about resignations. Up until today, all of these interactions were stored on either corporate databases or used in training data sets. The Incognito Chat removes this storage part altogether.

Meta will soon roll out another AI feature called "Side Chat," which would allows users to seek assistance from an AI in private mode during any ongoing conversation without disrupting the flow of discussion or sharing their context with anyone else.