Overview

• Italy’s competition authority has opened an antitrust investigation into Meta’s integration of its AI assistant in WhatsApp and led Guardia di Finanza raids on the company’s Italian offices to secure internal documents.
• Meta introduced the Advanced Chat Privacy feature in April, allowing users to block Meta AI from analyzing or storing messages in individual one-on-one and group chats.
• When enabled, the privacy setting stops automatic media downloads and disables chat exports while notifying all chat members and letting any participant activate the protection.
• User conversations remain end-to-end encrypted, but messages sent to Meta AI are processed outside this protection, fueling ongoing privacy concerns.
• Fact-checkers have debunked viral chain letters asserting the AI gains automatic access to private chats, confirming that only messages explicitly addressed to Meta AI are visible to the assistant.