Meta launched Incognito Chat with Meta AI on May 13, 2026, five days after quietly removing end-to-end encryption from Instagram direct messages — a sequence that digital-rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation called a broken promise. The new feature, rolling out now on WhatsApp and the Meta AI app, lets any of WhatsApp's two billion-plus users hold temporary AI conversations that Meta says even its own engineers cannot read. Whether that claim holds under scrutiny — and whether it can be trusted from a company carrying more than $7 billion in privacy penalties — is a question that matters to anyone who has ever asked an AI a medical, financial, or legally sensitive question.
