What WhatsApp’s “Advanced Chat Privacy” Really Does

In April, WhatsApp launched its “Advanced Chat Privacy” feature, which, once enabled, disables using certain AI features in chats and prevents conversations from being exported. Since its launch, an inaccurate viral post has been ping-ponging around social networks, creating confusion around what exactly it does.

The viral post falsely claims that if you do not enable Advanced Chat Privacy, Meta’s AI tools will be able to access your private conversations. This isn’t true, and it misrepresents both how Meta AI works and what Advanced Chat Privacy is.

The confusion seems to spawn from the fact that Meta AI can be invoked through a number of methods, including in any group chat with the @Meta AI command. While the chat contents between you and other people are always end-to-end encrypted on the app, what you say to Meta AI is not. Similarly, if you or anyone else in the chat chooses to use Meta AI's “Summarize” feature, which uses Meta’s “Private Processing” technology, that feature routes the text of the chat through Meta’s servers. However, the company claims that they cannot view the content of those messages. This feature remains opt-in, so it's up to you to decide if you want to use it. The company also recently released the results of two audits detailing the issues that have been found thus far and what they’ve done to fix it.

For example, if you and your buddy are chatting, and your friend types in @Meta AI and asks it a question, that part of the conversion, which you can both see, is not end-to-end encrypted, and is usable for AI training or whatever other purposes are included in Meta’s privacy policy. But otherwise, chats remain end-to-end encrypted.

Advanced Chat Privacy offers some bit of control over this. The new privacy feature isn’t a universal setting in WhatsApp; you can enable or disable it on a per-chat basis, but it’s turned off by default. When enabled, Advanced Chat Privacy does three core things:

• Blocks anyone in the chat from exporting the chats,
• Disables auto-downloading media to chat participant’s phones, and
• Disables some Meta AI features

Outside disabling some Meta AI features, Advanced Chat Privacy can be useful in other instances. For example, while someone can always screenshot chats, if you’re concerned about someone easily exporting an entire group chat history, Advanced Chat Privacy makes this harder to do because there’s no longer a one-tap option to do so. And since media can’t be automatically downloaded to someone’s phone (the “Save to Photos” option on the chat settings screen), it’s harder for an attachment to accidentally end up on someone’s device.

How to Enable Advanced Chat Privacy

Advanced Chat Privacy is enabled or disabled per chat. To enable it:

• Tap the chat name at the top of the screen.
• Select Advanced chat privacy, then tap the toggle to turn it on.

There are some quirks to how this works, though. For one, by default, anyone involved in a chat can turn Advanced Chat Privacy on or off at will, which limits its usefulness but at least helps ensure something doesn’t accidentally get sent to Meta AI.

There’s one way around this, which is for a group admin to lock down what users in the group can do. In an existing group chat that you are the administrator of, tap the chat name at the top of the screen, then:

• Scroll down to Group Permissions.
• Disable the option to “Edit Group Settings.” This makes it so only the administrator can change several important permissions, including Advanced Chat Privacy.