By Katie Paul and Jaspreet Singh

May 13 (Reuters) - Meta Platforms announced on Wednesday a new feature called "Incognito Chat" or "incognito chat" for its artificial intelligence assistant on WhatsApp, as it seeks to address data privacy concerns.

Meta said the hidden chats will be powered by its own processing technology, ensuring that conversations remain invisible to anyone, including the company itself.

The company added in a blog post, "Your conversations are not saved, and your messages disappear automatically, giving you space to think and explore ideas without being watched."

This move comes at a time when people often share sensitive information – personal, financial, health, or work-related – with AI assistants, despite privacy concerns about how companies store or use their data.

"We're starting to ask a lot of important questions about our lives to AI systems," WhatsApp president Will Cathcart said at a press conference. "It doesn't always seem like you should share the information behind those questions with the companies that run those AI systems."

The company's website indicated that the social media company uses messages shared by people with Meta AI to improve its artificial intelligence models, but personal conversations on WhatsApp remain protected by end-to-end encryption and cannot be accessed for this purpose.

Cathcart added that the incognito chat is currently limited to text, meaning users will not be able to upload images.

He added that the artificial intelligence will also have built-in safety controls, refusing to answer problematic questions or steering conversations in different directions.

Meta said it also plans to introduce a SideChat feature with Meta AI in the next few months, a feature that will allow users to get private help within any WhatsApp conversation.