Fake news on WhatsApp
Since 2025, fake news has been circulating on WhatsApp and other social networks:
Starting Saturday, AI will be available on WhatsApp and will have access to all conversations.
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3. Scroll down and enable the "Advanced Privacy" option.
Do it as soon as possible and share
...
After investigation and having been lured,
it turns out that this news is totally flawed.
I confirmed this by questioning le Chat
Where does this widely circulated fake news come from?
Where does this fake news come from? AI response
It is a Recurrent viral chain hoax on WhatsApp, without an identified author, who has been circulating since 2025 (just after the deployment of Meta AI in Europe in March 2025) and resurfacing in waves – for example in June 2026 with an invented ‘Saturday 6 June’. The famous "Saturday" is never dated and moves with each resurgence (Clubic ).
Why it seems credible: it relies on a very real function, the "Advanced Confidentiality of Discussion" (introduced in April 2025), claiming that it must be activated urgently to prevent Meta AI from reading all conversations. This is not true in all respects:
- Meta AI is already available since March 2025, there is no "general activation on Saturday" (afp )
- AI does not read that messages where it is explicitly mentioned (@Meta AI) or sent to it; the rest is protected by end-to-end encryption (clubic , France bleu )
- The real point of vigilance: requests sent to Meta AI are indeed transmitted to Meta – but not your private conversations (Clubic )
Exact origin: impossible to trace (classic anonymous chain), but it is an evolution of old hoax on WhatsApp privacy, rewritten around the fear of AI. Even journalists who tested by asking Meta AI to summarize a private conversation had a refusal (RadioFrance ).
In summary: no urgency, do not forward the message. If you still want to strengthen a group's privacy, the "Advanced Privacy" option exists in the conversation settings.
What does Whatsapp know about our data since the messages are encrypted? (AI)
End-to-end encryption protects only the content your messages (texts, photos, calls). But WhatsApp/Meta collects a lot of metadata :
What they can NOT see:
- The content of your messages, calls, photos, vocalnotes
- Nor even WhatsApp itself (keys are on your phones)
What they collect:
| Data | Detail |
|---|---|
| 🕐 Time stamps | Exact date and time of each message sent/received |
| 👤 Contacts | Your full address book (if allowed), who talks to whom, frequency |
| Technical 📶 | IP address, phone model, operating system, battery, signal quality |
| 📍 Location | Approximate via IP; exact if you share live location |
| 📱 Phone number | Main ID, shared with Facebook and Instagram |
| 🏢 Groups | Names of groups, members, who participates |
| ✅ Acknowledgements of receipt | Who reads what and when |
Why this is so sensitive: even without reading the messages, this metadata makes it possible to reconstruct a detailed social graph – your dating, your sleep schedules, your relationships, which influences who. This is why metadata is subject to judicial investigations and used by intelligence services.
Important nuances:
- The cloud backups (Google Drive/iCloud) are only encrypted end-to-end if you enable password protection – otherwise the cloud provider can access it
- What you write Directly to Meta AI is processed out of encryption, like any query sent to a chatbot
- WhatsApp metadata is mainly used by Meta for its other activities (targeted advertising on Facebook/Instagram, detection of abuse)
In summary: the content is well protected, but who, when, how many times and from where — all this is known to Meta. This is the standard price for centralised couriers; Alternatives like Signal collect radically less metadata.
How to Disable Advanced Privacy
Putting advanced privacy on a discussion has edge effects
- media are no longer visible in Google Photos
- the new media are copied to a subdirectory of WhatApp Images: Private
To disable advanced privacy:
- go to the settings menu of the discussion concerned (the 3 dots at the top right)
- select the sub-menu: Group Info
- go to the Media tab and press Advanced Discussion Setup
