Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma took to X (formerly Twitter) to make a bold claim against WhatsApp’s advertised “end-to-end encryption” feature. He said that the messaging and calling app is now allowing artificial intelligence (AI) to “read chats” if one is added to a WhatsApp group. Sharma also urged people to “enable” a setting to “block” WhatsApp from doing so.
“If you are part of a WhatsApp group. Today onwards, WhatsApp is allowing AI to read chats,” Sharma claimed in his social media post.
He added, “So enable this setting to block it.”
WhatsApp’s advanced chat privacy
If you are added to any group on WhatsApp and go to “group info”, you will see an option for “advanced chat privacy”. It is marked off by default. If you turned it on, people in the group won’t be able to do three things. These are:
1- Save media to their device gallery automatically.
2- Use AI to summarise chats by mentioning “@MetaAI”.
3- Export the chat.
The advanced chat privacy of WhatsApp says: “Limit how messages and media from this chat can be shared outside of WhatsApp.”
It adds, “Your personal messages are protected with end-to-end encryption even if you don’t turn on advanced chat privacy. No one outside of the chat, not even WhatsApp or Meta, can read, listen to, or share them.”
Claim is ‘inaccurate’, says WABetaInfo
Reacting to Paytm founder’s post, WABetaInfo said that it is “inaccurate”.
It explained, “Only messages that mention Meta AI are shared with it, and you can check if Meta AI has read your message by opening the Message Info screen. If you choose to enable Advanced Chat Privacy, you won’t be able to use some AI features, but this doesn’t mean your messages are automatically shared with Meta AI.”
‘Data is the new fuel’: social media
Social media users, after going through his post and the screenshots he attached, thanked him for the heads up and expressed that that is why they believe that “data is the new fuel”.
One social media user said, “Privacy is completely Moh Maya now! Everything is open via one or another tool. Normal people hardly care/know. That’s exactly why data is the new fuel!”
“Thanks for the heads up,” expressed a third, while a fourth posted, “One can never trust Meta.”
Yet another user commented, “Crazy that one will have to do this for every group and not in one go. Definitely the intent is to train LLMs.”