Meta is bringing more AI into WhatsApp, but with a firm promise not to read your messages and respect your privacy.
The platform just announced the rollout of a new AI-powered message summaries feature, allowing users to quickly catch up on unread messages within a chat. Crucially, these summaries are private and visible only to you, not to anyone else in the conversation.
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This new feature builds on the Meta AI capabilities introduced earlier this year, with a strong focus on privacy. Using what Meta calls “Private Processing” technology, summaries are generated without compromising WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption.
Meta, WhatsApp, and even Meta AI itself don’t “see” your messages or the summaries.
“No one else in the chat can see that you summarized unread messages either,” the company emphasized in a blog post.
By default, the feature is turned off but if you’re eligible, WhatsApp will show a small icon to let you know it’s available. Users can manage this feature (and others like it) under the new Settings > Chats > Private Processing menu, which allows toggling individual functions on or off.
Initially, the summaries will only be available to users in the U.S. and in English, but Meta says support for more countries and languages is on the way later this year.
Until now, Meta AI inside WhatsApp could only respond to general queries or tagged messages, without access to actual chat content. But with the new private processing framework, WhatsApp can now access context to do things like summarize threads or suggest replies, all while preserving its privacy promise.
One thing’s clear: Meta isn’t just pushing AI into products, it’s trying to do it on users’ terms. Whether or not people embrace these private-but-powerful features will depend on one thing: trust.