Meta’s new AI Feature Can Summarise Your WhatsApp Chats, But Can You Trust It

Meta has dropped a new AI-powered tool for WhatsApp called Message Summaries. It sounds like it could save your life. Too many conversations?  No time to scroll?  Let Meta AI swiftly bring you up to date with a clean summary of your unread chats. But although the feature promises to make things easier, it also raises a lot of important considerations, especially about privacy, openness, and control. 

What is Meta’s Message Summaries Feature? 

Meta says this feature gives you an idea of what is happening before reading the details in your unread messages. Instead of reading every unread message one at a time, you'll get a quick synopsis from AI that tells you what the conversation is about.  Your friends won't know you used it, no. And yes, this feature is optional. It is off by default, and you have to set it on for it to work. 

But what about your privacy? 

This is when it gets fun.  Meta says that the feature employs something they call "Private Processing," which is their way of saying that it does AI tasks without submitting your messages to Meta servers.  They say that all of this happens on your smartphone, so Meta never sees your chats or summaries. 

Let's be honest: Meta isn't excellent at handling user data.  So, of course, a lot of people will ask: Can we be sure that they aren't reading our messages now or in the future?  Meta says that WhatsApp's end-to-end encryption is quite good, and they say that this function doesn't break it.  But the fact that AI is involved, even if it's "private," implies that there is now a barrier between you and your communications that wasn't there before. 

You still have control...  sort  of

Message Summaries is optional, which is a good thing for Meta.  You can choose whether or not you want it and which chats it works with.  You can even stop it from getting into certain talks. But here's the thing: just because you turn it off doesn't mean AI isn't being pushed harder on WhatsApp.  Right now, it merely implies you're not going to do it.  This is only one component of a much greater rollout if you've been following Meta's bigger AI push (like Meta AI in search, Instagram, and Messenger). 

In the big picture, is this useful or just another AI land grab?  On the one hand, Message Summaries seems like a real way to deal with the problem of too many messages.  But that's just another step in Meta's gradual march to put AI into everything. That's not always a good thing, because it could mean giving up more control over how your "private" data is used. 

We shouldn't forget that Meta also recently got in trouble in Europe for training AI on public posts without asking for permission first.  The corporation now talks a lot about privacy, but there are still good reasons to ask tough questions.

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