WhatsApp rolls out AI-powered message summaries

If your friends and relatives cannot get straight to the point, WhatsApp can help them do so by summarizing lengthy messages.

WhatsApp introduced Message summaries so that users could quickly “get an idea of what’s happening” without even reading their messages.

The message will be summarized using MetaAI. Its Private Processing technology allegedly allows WhatsApp to generate a summary “without Meta or WhatsApp ever seeing your messages or the private summaries”.

Apparently, other users in the chat won’t know you summarized unread messages either.

“This means your privacy is protected at all times,” WhatsApp said.

In late April, the company acknowledged it operated in a “highly adversarial environment” on their engineering blog. Back then, it listed three possible scenarios of how threat actors could potentially exploit the feature:

1. External actors directly exploit the exposed product attack surface or compromise the services running in Private Processing CVMs (confidential virtual machines) to extract messages.
2. Internal or external attackers extract messages exposed through the CVM.
3. Insiders with physical or remote access to Private Processing hosts interfere with the CVM at boot and runtime, potentially bypassing the protections in order to extract messages.

While all scenarios are somewhat likely, the company assured it was doing its best — namely, tracking new flaws and minimizing attack surface — to protect its users.

Message Summaries is an optional feature and is off by default. Use Advanced Chat Privacy to select which chats can be shared for artificial intelligence (AI) features.