Building Private Processing for AI Tools on WhatsApp

Summary

We are inspired by the possibilities of AI to help people be more creative, productive, and stay closely connected on WhatsApp, so we set out to build a new technology that allows our users around the world to use AI in a privacy-preserving way. We’re sharing an early look into Private Processing, an optional capability that enables users to initiate a request to a confidential and secure environment and use AI for processing messages where no one — including Meta and WhatsApp — can access them. To validate our implementation of these and other security principles, independent security researchers will be able to continuously verify our privacy and security architecture and its integrity. AI has revolutionized the way people interact with technology and information, making it possible for people to automate complex tasks and gain valuable insights from vast amounts of data. However, the current state of AI processing — which relies on large language models often running on servers, rather than mobile hardware — requires that users’ requests are visible to the provider. Although that works for many use cases, it presents challenges in enabling people to use AI to process private messages while preserving the level of privacy afforded by end-to-end encryption. We set out to enable AI capabilities with the privacy that people have come to expect from WhatsApp, so that AI can deliver helpful capabilities, such as summarizing messages, without Meta or WhatsApp having access to them, and in the way that meets the following principles: Optionality: Using Meta AI through WhatsApp, including features that use Private Processing, must be optional. Transparency: We must provide transparency when our features use Private Processing. User control: For people’s most sensitive chats that require extra assurance, they must be able to prevent messages from being used for AI features like mentioning Meta AI in chats, with the help of WhatApp’s Advanced Chat Privacy feature. Introduci...