Tech
WhatsApp AI Chat: Private Cloud-Based Conversations Coming Soon
WhatsApp AI chat
A new WhatsApp feature that Meta claims is a private method to communicate with Meta AI was launched. Called “Private Processing,” the feature is fully optional, releases in the “coming weeks,” and neither Meta, WhatsApp, nor third-party firms will be able to observe exchanges that utilize it, according to the release.
According to Meta, customers may utilize Private Processing to “direct AI to process their requests,” such as for AI conversation summaries. According to the business, if users do, the system will not “retain access to user messages once the session is complete,” preventing a possible attacker from accessing them after the fact.
Meta aims to stop hackers from focusing on users without first jeopardizing the system as a whole. Independent third parties should be “able to audit the behavior of Private Processing to independently verify our privacy and security guarantees,” according to the statement. Private Processing is already included in Meta’s bug bounty program, and as the system’s debut approaches, the business plans to publish a “detailed security engineering design paper.”
Meta’s description of the technology sounds a lot like Apple’s Private Cloud Compute (PCC). Similar to Apple, Meta claims that it will employ a third-party supplier for OHTTP, a technology that masks users’ IP addresses, to forward Private Processing requests. However, as Wired points out, one distinction is that users must start Private Processing since all of WhatsApp’s AI queries are processed on Meta’s servers. However, when queries are sent to Apple’s servers, PCC is used instead of on-device AI processing.