Are Chats With Meta AI On WhatsApp Encrypted? Here's What Mark Zuckerberg's Social Giant Has To Say

Meta AI on WhatsApp: Is someone else reading your chats with Meta's latest AI offering? Here's what the company's official stance is.

Meta claims that there's nothing to worry about, when it comes to WhatsApp's message encryptions.

Source : Kasia Derenda/Unsplash

Meta AI, the Llama-3 powered generative AI chatbot from Mark Zuckerberg's social media giant, began rolling out to all users on WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook earlier this week. On Friday, June 28, most users in India reported getting the update on their devices. While on Instagram and Facebook, Meta AI chats appear as a separate account on the chat pages, WhatsApp is promoting the new feature with a unique icon on top of the home page (both on desktop and app clients). All you need to do is click on the circular icon and start chatting with Meta AI.

Now, Meta AI has no limit on what sort of queries you can ask on WhatsApp. If you've used any AI-driven chatbot like ChatGPT and Gemini, you have a pretty good idea about how to deal with Meta AI as well. You ask a question, or give it a prompt/task to do, and it will respond immediately in text format - just like chatting with another person via text.

This led this author to wonder: Is anyone else reading my chats with Meta AI on WhatsApp?

Meta AI Chats On WhatsApp: Are They Encrypted?

As you chat with Meta AI on WhatsApp, you might ask it certain personal questions. These might range from something seemingly fun and harmless like "How to get your crush to notice you?" to something possibly serious and super-personal like "How to protect your crypto assets?" or even "How to deal with increasing baldness?" There's certainly no limit on what you can ask a chatbot.

Now, is someone else reading these chats? Should you be worried that your data and chats become public? Or, perhaps more pertinently, will Meta AI read other chats as well?

Meta claims that there's nothing to worry about. For starters, Meta AI can only read and reply to questions mentioned in @Meta AI (in group chats) or on personal DMs. 

"As always, your personal messages and calls remain end-to-end encrypted, meaning not even WhatsApp or Meta can see or listen to them," Meta explained in a blog. 

So, if we go by the official explanation, it'd seem that Meta AI chats will work similar to regular chats on WhatsApp and will carry end-to-end encryption.