WhatsApp is working on private AI chats in the cloud

Meta announced a new WhatsApp feature it says is a private way to interact with Meta AI. Called “Private Processing,” the feature is totally optional, launches in the “coming weeks,” and neither Meta, WhatsApp, nor third-party companies will be able to see interactions that use it, according to the release.

Meta says users can “direct AI to process their requests,” like for AI chat summaries, using Private Processing. If they do, the system won’t “retain access to user messages once the session is complete” so that a potential attacker can’t access them after the fact, according to the company.

Meta wants to prevent attackers from targeting users without first compromising the whole system. It also wants to ensure that independent third parties are “able to audit the behavior of Private Processing to independently verify our privacy and security guarantees.” Private Processing is now part of Meta’s bug bounty program, and the company promises to release a “detailed security engineering design paper” as it gets closer to launching the system.

The system Meta describes sounds similar to Apple’s Private Cloud Compute (PCC). Like Apple, Meta says it will relay Private Processing requests through a third-party provider for OHTTP, a protocol that obscures users’ IP addresses. But as Wired notes, one difference is that all of WhatsApp’s AI requests are handled on Meta’s servers and users have to initiate Private Processing. On the other hand, Apple defaults to on-device AI processing, but defaults to PCC when requests go to its servers.