WeChat refutes rumors that AI assistant Xiaowei "directly reads chat records" and "snoops on privacy"

On September 15, WeChat employee @Kecun Xiaojiang posted a response regarding privacy-related issues involving "WeChat Xiaowei": 1. The information Xiaowei can access will not exceed the scope of permissions for information you yourself can view. For example, some friends worry about whether deleted Moments posts can be seen. Rest assured, they cannot; 2. Xiaowei will make recommendations for some questions based on follow, browsing, and interaction data from Official Accounts, Channels, and more. Rest assured, principle 1 is also followed here; 3. Regarding chat records, only in a chat scenario, when you actively initiate "Ask Xiaowei," will Xiaowei be temporarily invoked to read the most recent chat information locally from the WeChat client. After analysis and summarization, the original chat records will not be saved. This follows the general "use and discard" logic; 4. Some posts saying Xiaowei "directly reads chat records" and "snoops on all privacy" are untrue. According to the introduction, WeChat Xiaowei is a native AI assistant developed by the WeChat team and is currently in small-scale beta testing. Users can use text or voice conversations to have Xiaowei check the weather, track packages, and order takeout; in addition, in scenarios such as Moments, Official Accounts, chats, and Channels, Xiaowei can also be invoked at any time when needed to summarize content, provide more information, and more.