WhatsApp got just a bright new trick: Meta AI will now have to look at your until your until you will look and spit a quick summary. Meta is pitching it as an alternative feature that lives in the cloud but somehow remains personal thanks for “personal processing”.
It seems clean, but it also means that Meta AI is technically reading your chat – encrypted or not.
AI Summary Land on WhatsApp
The feature is already live for some American users. Open a chat with until the unpaid messages, and you will see the general counter flash, this time with an AI badge that reads that privately summons. Tap it, and the badge spreads to the bullet-point recap of the until the until the until.
The message summary uses the private processing structure of the meta, which executes AI computation inside a hardware-supported reliable execution environment (TEE) on the cloud server of the meta. Within that enclave, your until you are decipped, ensued by meta AI, then left immediately – Alteli has never seen or stored in any database.
End-to-end encryption still protects your messages in transit. However, by summarizing private processing, that encryption is lifted inside the safe enclave so that AI can read your chat. Outside that enclave, everything remains encrypted. Either Meta is called.
Encrypted, but exposed?
Cloud-based AI processing always raises eyebrows. Assuming that Meta does not collect data itself. Even a watertite enclave can be hacked or legally forced.
While Meta said that it never stores your summary, the backup history of WhatsApp tells us that privacy is not their first priority: till September 2021, the chat backup became unnovated for iCloud and Google Drive, which means that any person, or any person, can read a safety collection with access to those clouds.
Connected
If you use Meta AI then you need to change this setting immediately.
Meta AI is sharing your quick history, and you may not even realize that this is happening.
This is not the first time Meta’s AI got stuck on secrecy. Not long ago, WhatsApp AI Assistant confidently asked the total stranger of a private user to information about the train. When encountered, AI lied about the “fictional” points, and removed the responsibility.
Even if AI never makes your real messages, it hits the metadata quietly; It tracks what chat you do, ask to be summarized, how many times you bend on it, and in which context you ask for a roundup.
This use is gold for pattern behavioral profiles, with everything that has family plays, in which you invest the most what work you are interacting.
Optional confusion
Meta stressed that these are AI summary opt-in, but both of you and I know how to actually work feature rollouts. One day you notice a little AI badge in your chat, the next time you open the app, it insists every time. Granulated control three menus are deep, so most people simply click “Accept” and wonder why their app seems different. Alternative only in name, actually.
Similarly, it would be innocent to think that it stops at the summary: Once plumbing, the meta can slide in smart answers, live translation, or cross-chat analysis under the guise of “help”. This will gradually spread the original feature in a fully developed AI monitoring toolkit.
And privacy on one side – what are we doing as human beings too? You are going to read an AI summary of your personal chat, use AI to write answers, then your friend’s AI summarizes your AI’s message and writes a new, so you can read that summary? At some point, it is just talking to bots bots while we skim summary.
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WhatsApp’s meta AI button is easy, but there are 5 reasons I will not use it
The AI button did not say to anyone, but everyone got it. Thanks, Meta.
Before you hit that togle, ask yourself whether the feature is worth giving Meta AI more likely to peep on your chat. Relying on your privacy for a company with a spotted record is no brain-no matter how sweet those shortcuts look.
