What bothers me about these projects is you are exposing the other side of your conversations to being uploaded to a 3rd party AI company who will ingest it in to their training data. You personally might not care about this privacy intrusion but the people you are messaging never consented to this.
it's an MCP, so you could theoretically hook it up to a private/local model/agent.
but it's an MCP, so that also means it'll be more token-verbose than an API, which means your local agent hardware is going to chug a bit.
i have reached the point of just using LLMs to build my own API servers and tooling like search, and teach the LLM how to use those APIs, rather than MCPs.
I agree with you on principal but also think that from a practical point, that ship has long sailed.
It's always been a possibility that when you sent an email to someone their provider could be building an ad profile on you. Any third party tool someone else uses to manage their personal files and communications could always have some arbitrary privacy policy that let them do what they see fit.
For the most part, you never know what random SAAS someone on the other end of a relationship is really using.
> It's always been a possibility that when you sent an email
Yes, and that's exactly why E2EE messaging became a thing. Signal put it on the map through the WhatsApp integration.
To me there is a difference if the server spies on me (that's without E2EE) or if the person I am writing to leaks everything on the Internet.
If the person you're writing to leaks everything on the Internet, you should consider you are talking to them in public. I'm sure you don't say all the same things when you are in the metro or when you are in private, or do you?
> Yes, and that's exactly why E2EE messaging became a thing.
Pretty much never for email. Maybe some people go out of their way to perform PGP but that's usually only for the most sensitive of information and sometimes not even for that.
The only thing I've used PGP for in many years is encrypting my home address when buying darknet drugs
Yes but I'd say some people (me) like WhatsApp because of the privacy and end-to-end encryption. Email i assume is less private but still more private than a public post.
Imagine someone puts all the Signal messages someone else sent them through an AI. I dunno. I think problem is most AI doesn't work like Confer.to, also by Signal's founder.
People have been screenshotting conversations, saving them on their phones, and sending them to friends over text for as long as there have been conversations to screenshot.
The entire concept of conversations being "secure" is only as good as your ability to trust the other party isn't doing something insecure with them (and that yours and their devices are, themselves, as secure as you think they are. Which they generally aren't.)
All of which is to say, it's security theater and always has been when applied to real life situations.
This has been happening for years... I distinctly remember people giving access to contacts to Whatsapp and having the entire contacts slurped into their cloud.
WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted, that's probably* better than using Telegram.
* Unless you want to go into a conspiracy theory that all the Meta employees can see the source code and nobody has ever felt like whistleblowing about the backdoor Meta put into WhatsApp, that is.
WhatsApp obviously more encrypted than Telegram since later have no proper E2EE whatsorver by default and also sync all history from server.
Its still preferable to use Signal since now it actually supports numberless registration. Hopefully they will actually fee payable not via credit card at some point.
You never know what the people you're talking to are doing with your data. This isn't any different. The conversation involves 3 parties: Sender, WhatsApp & Recipient. If you want your conversation to be private, you must trust all 3.
I never know that the people preparing my food at the restaurant are doing with it either but if I see someone doing something wrong I'm going to call it out. We should all make an effort to maintain some level of ethics even if we don't have total control over the environment.
Feeding someone else's personal data in to an AI company is unethical even if there is no way as an individual to prevent someone doing that.
I am not saying this proudly, but given how important is to stay in touch with others, I would never jeopardize my Gmail account and my Whatsapp account. Understand that using a bot to access your Whatsapp account is against TOS and your account could be suspended.
I literally just went through it saying I was violating the TOS on my personal account for the crime of linking my Mac and IOS phone as a secondary account to my main account on my Android phone. I had been using this workflow for a few years and this happened all of the sudden earlier this month. This was using the Whatsapp official apps and recommended process for doing this.
When that happens it immediately cuts your access and makes you request a reconsideration that can take 24+ hours. Some accounts get booted without this option. So if you use Whatsapp for anything important that can be a really big problem. I was reinstated, and only discovered this from going through a couple of cycles trying to add these back.
So doing what you are doing with this seems almost like a guarantee that you will be perma banned.
I've experimented with some of these whatsapp-web-esque hacks (whatsappweb.js, whatsmeow, ...) and every now and then I'll get banned. It's quite inconvenient if you live in a country where WA is the universal contact channel for pretty much everything.
I don't get how of the personal assistant can be useful without having to see my conversational data so this is great.
Do you know if running Whatsapp in Cloud risks your account to be banned?
I'm working on a similar tool, connecting all that data to build your context graph that knows all the people and conversations and expose it via MCP. https://lobu.ai/for/personal/
My approach is requiring you to have a home device where you keep your accounts open in a browser and observing the data from there. The same applies to Linkedin, Instagram, X etc. even reading my timeline to summarize what I need to know without me doomscrolling.
I've always regarded WhatsApp as a very private thing and if on the other side of things, if somebody's using repos like these and uploading my messages, you know, which as far as we know are being read by Claude and all these AI companies, the more data you put in, the more data they get inside and for their training and they could use it for, I don't know, God knows what. But I never consented to this. So the more trouble here is not that you're using it or people are using it. The trouble is that there are a lot of people in the world who have not consented to this. There are people on the other side of WhatsApp who have not consented to this. Why would you build something like that? I mean, it's just unfair for a lot of people.
While I see the security concerns I would like to point out that this project is interesting and a great stepping stone for easier to make whatsapp AI support chat bots.
I've been using Baileys - but it's not ideal. (Periodically you have to go manually log the bot back in.) Is there no platform that's friendly to personal bots? Or is that what Telegram is for? Discord I suppose...
Interesting approach, we did kaptionai.com/mcp with a slightly different approach, the MCP runs on your own WhatsApp Web or in our own app, it can run locally or through our own bridge (which is open source as well).
What bothers me about these projects is you are exposing the other side of your conversations to being uploaded to a 3rd party AI company who will ingest it in to their training data. You personally might not care about this privacy intrusion but the people you are messaging never consented to this.
it's an MCP, so you could theoretically hook it up to a private/local model/agent.
but it's an MCP, so that also means it'll be more token-verbose than an API, which means your local agent hardware is going to chug a bit.
i have reached the point of just using LLMs to build my own API servers and tooling like search, and teach the LLM how to use those APIs, rather than MCPs.
I agree with you on principal but also think that from a practical point, that ship has long sailed.
It's always been a possibility that when you sent an email to someone their provider could be building an ad profile on you. Any third party tool someone else uses to manage their personal files and communications could always have some arbitrary privacy policy that let them do what they see fit.
For the most part, you never know what random SAAS someone on the other end of a relationship is really using.
> It's always been a possibility that when you sent an email
Yes, and that's exactly why E2EE messaging became a thing. Signal put it on the map through the WhatsApp integration.
To me there is a difference if the server spies on me (that's without E2EE) or if the person I am writing to leaks everything on the Internet.
If the person you're writing to leaks everything on the Internet, you should consider you are talking to them in public. I'm sure you don't say all the same things when you are in the metro or when you are in private, or do you?
> Yes, and that's exactly why E2EE messaging became a thing.
Pretty much never for email. Maybe some people go out of their way to perform PGP but that's usually only for the most sensitive of information and sometimes not even for that.
The only thing I've used PGP for in many years is encrypting my home address when buying darknet drugs
Yes but I'd say some people (me) like WhatsApp because of the privacy and end-to-end encryption. Email i assume is less private but still more private than a public post.
Imagine someone puts all the Signal messages someone else sent them through an AI. I dunno. I think problem is most AI doesn't work like Confer.to, also by Signal's founder.
People have been screenshotting conversations, saving them on their phones, and sending them to friends over text for as long as there have been conversations to screenshot.
The entire concept of conversations being "secure" is only as good as your ability to trust the other party isn't doing something insecure with them (and that yours and their devices are, themselves, as secure as you think they are. Which they generally aren't.)
All of which is to say, it's security theater and always has been when applied to real life situations.
There's a difference between small scale screenshotting certain conversations, and wholesale vacuuming up everything in to the AI machine.
the ship has long sailed but there is a massive supertanker way worse and we don't have to make it easier on them
It hasn't since long sailed.
This ship has sailed about two decades ago. At least let's get some cool products out of it.
This has been happening for years... I distinctly remember people giving access to contacts to Whatsapp and having the entire contacts slurped into their cloud.
There is a big difference between leaking the contacts (that is, metadata) and the conversations themselves.
Google has most of my email because it has all of yours (2014)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43901204
They're using a Facebook product. The privacy damage already occurred.
WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted, that's probably* better than using Telegram.
* Unless you want to go into a conspiracy theory that all the Meta employees can see the source code and nobody has ever felt like whistleblowing about the backdoor Meta put into WhatsApp, that is.
It is end-to-end encrypted, but aren't chat history backups stored in plain text on some server?
even if all meta employees see the source they cannot read messages as long as keys as generated on-device, which is verifiable
WhatsApp obviously more encrypted than Telegram since later have no proper E2EE whatsorver by default and also sync all history from server.
Its still preferable to use Signal since now it actually supports numberless registration. Hopefully they will actually fee payable not via credit card at some point.
> 3rd party AI company who will ingest it
Not like Meta is a saint...since they're competitors
True but WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted so they shouldn't see any of your messages anyway.
You never know what the people you're talking to are doing with your data. This isn't any different. The conversation involves 3 parties: Sender, WhatsApp & Recipient. If you want your conversation to be private, you must trust all 3.
I never know that the people preparing my food at the restaurant are doing with it either but if I see someone doing something wrong I'm going to call it out. We should all make an effort to maintain some level of ethics even if we don't have total control over the environment.
Feeding someone else's personal data in to an AI company is unethical even if there is no way as an individual to prevent someone doing that.
The complete disintegration of the concept of intellectual property seems worth it
use muse so it stays in house /s
I am not saying this proudly, but given how important is to stay in touch with others, I would never jeopardize my Gmail account and my Whatsapp account. Understand that using a bot to access your Whatsapp account is against TOS and your account could be suspended.
I literally just went through it saying I was violating the TOS on my personal account for the crime of linking my Mac and IOS phone as a secondary account to my main account on my Android phone. I had been using this workflow for a few years and this happened all of the sudden earlier this month. This was using the Whatsapp official apps and recommended process for doing this.
When that happens it immediately cuts your access and makes you request a reconsideration that can take 24+ hours. Some accounts get booted without this option. So if you use Whatsapp for anything important that can be a really big problem. I was reinstated, and only discovered this from going through a couple of cycles trying to add these back.
So doing what you are doing with this seems almost like a guarantee that you will be perma banned.
AI built me an Android gateway that can send/read text messages along with connectivity to my local AI over wireguard.
If a bot needs to text me it sends an API request or it can read whatever I allow with full visibility as I have the logs and limit the access.
The amount of effort was minimal. About 4 prompts to get it all working and zero SaaS, 3rd party, or purchases after the software was built.
I've experimented with some of these whatsapp-web-esque hacks (whatsappweb.js, whatsmeow, ...) and every now and then I'll get banned. It's quite inconvenient if you live in a country where WA is the universal contact channel for pretty much everything.
I don't get how of the personal assistant can be useful without having to see my conversational data so this is great.
Do you know if running Whatsapp in Cloud risks your account to be banned?
I'm working on a similar tool, connecting all that data to build your context graph that knows all the people and conversations and expose it via MCP. https://lobu.ai/for/personal/
My approach is requiring you to have a home device where you keep your accounts open in a browser and observing the data from there. The same applies to Linkedin, Instagram, X etc. even reading my timeline to summarize what I need to know without me doomscrolling.
Free messaging MCP. What could possibly go wrong?
I've always regarded WhatsApp as a very private thing and if on the other side of things, if somebody's using repos like these and uploading my messages, you know, which as far as we know are being read by Claude and all these AI companies, the more data you put in, the more data they get inside and for their training and they could use it for, I don't know, God knows what. But I never consented to this. So the more trouble here is not that you're using it or people are using it. The trouble is that there are a lot of people in the world who have not consented to this. There are people on the other side of WhatsApp who have not consented to this. Why would you build something like that? I mean, it's just unfair for a lot of people.
While I see the security concerns I would like to point out that this project is interesting and a great stepping stone for easier to make whatsapp AI support chat bots.
Much safer to just use Meta Business Agent, avoids bans.
I've been using Baileys - but it's not ideal. (Periodically you have to go manually log the bot back in.) Is there no platform that's friendly to personal bots? Or is that what Telegram is for? Discord I suppose...
Cloudflare already sniffs most of the internet traffic, why not also let them see our private messages?!
To anyone thinking of going the official route, beware twillio, their KYC is terrible.
Interesting approach, we did kaptionai.com/mcp with a slightly different approach, the MCP runs on your own WhatsApp Web or in our own app, it can run locally or through our own bridge (which is open source as well).
The big difference is that we support attachments and transcribe the audios, we've been in business for over 4 years.
What does cloudflare contribute? free hosting or
Like, is clouflare just a saas for hosting memcached or does it provide some distinct sense of value that the rest of us don't see?
Let's centralize the internet even more, why not