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Show HN: WhatsApp MCP running free on Cloudflare

112 pointsposted 13 hours ago

57 Comments

SchemaLoad

11 hours ago

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.

doesnt_know

11 hours ago

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.

palata

10 hours ago

> 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?

random2021

3 hours ago

Your comment is correct but rarely practical.

- Most people are not in Signal

- I have friends that want utmost privacy and shun me for using Android and buy iPhone etc but then install Google Maps. Add my name/address/email/phone etc to google sync.

- Worse - many employers are using FAANG for services. How many managers are uploading Excel sheets? Who supervisors them?

- Even if I keep every thing locally (which I don't ) finally govt will lose their passport database and ...

gbalduzzi

an hour ago

> - Most people are not in Signal

Whatsapp uses the Signal protocol for E2EE: https://signal.org/blog/whatsapp-complete/

So yeah, whatsapp messages are E2E encrypted and therefore can not be used as training data unless you upload them to the cloud manually, as this project does

LoganDark

8 hours ago

> 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

jimkleiber

10 hours ago

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.

j_bizzle

10 hours ago

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.

SchemaLoad

9 hours ago

There's a difference between small scale screenshotting certain conversations, and wholesale vacuuming up everything in to the AI machine.

hamburglar

3 hours ago

Except now there’s not. The fact is, when you tell somebody something, what they choose to do with it is out of your hands. Unless you want to start using drm-encumbered systems.

ale42

an hour ago

There's still a difference between a person deciding to share one or a bunch of messages they receive --usually I know the people I write to, so I know more or less what to expect-- and systematically uploading received message to some AI. Fine if they do it locally, not fine if the messages I write end up at Google, OpenAI or anybody else.

hamburglar

26 minutes ago

This is unrealistic. Hardly anyone who is going to feed their own messages to an AI is going to pay attention to whether it’s local or cloud based. Get real.

anonreplier

an hour ago

So you're saying DRM is good now?

hamburglar

27 minutes ago

No, I’m saying when you send messages to someone else, they are out of your control. Trying to fight that with DRM would be folly.

BorisMelnik

8 hours ago

the ship has long sailed but there is a massive supertanker way worse and we don't have to make it easier on them

j45

10 hours ago

It hasn't since long sailed.

toppa33

an hour ago

So true! I respect the work too, but there are plenty of people who haven’t consented. However, is it that different to Meta reading your messages? Lol

jacmilts

an hour ago

Meta is a privacy nightmare but at least with them it's E2E encrypted. With an MCP running on cloudflare I'm guessing it's processed plainly.

dvt

11 hours ago

This ship has sailed about two decades ago. At least let's get some cool products out of it.

_ink_

11 hours ago

Google has most of my email because it has all of yours (2014)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43901204

WrtCdEvrydy

11 hours ago

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.

palata

10 hours ago

There is a big difference between leaking the contacts (that is, metadata) and the conversations themselves.

keerthiko

4 hours ago

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.

ceejayoz

10 hours ago

They're using a Facebook product. The privacy damage already occurred.

palata

10 hours ago

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.

ale42

an hour ago

> WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted

Don't forget that metadata is not encrypted, so Meta know who you are writing to, who writes to you, who your contacts are, all the usage pattens of the app, and more metadata (not sure if it's still the case, but a few years ago WhatsApp even uploaded the battery state of your phone to Meta).

SXX

8 hours ago

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.

MYEUHD

5 hours ago

It is end-to-end encrypted, but aren't chat history backups stored in plain text on some server?

jeroenhd

13 minutes ago

If you don't encrypt the backups, they are unencrypted, yes. That's why you should encrypt your backups. It's baked right into WhatsApp on the screen where you manage your backups.

simplesocieties

4 hours ago

These two things are mutually exclusive. They can store encrypted backups on a server somewhere, but unless they have the decryption keys from both parties (E2E) then no, it can't be stored in plain-text.

arshxyz

5 hours ago

even if all meta employees see the source they cannot read messages as long as keys as generated on-device, which is verifiable

asciii

8 hours ago

> 3rd party AI company who will ingest it

Not like Meta is a saint...since they're competitors

Rohansi

8 hours ago

True but WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted so they shouldn't see any of your messages anyway.

TonyFalco

8 hours ago

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.

SchemaLoad

8 hours ago

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.

throwaway27448

11 hours ago

The complete disintegration of the concept of intellectual property seems worth it

delijati

11 hours ago

use muse so it stays in house /s

101008

8 hours ago

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.

lgleason

7 hours ago

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.

meherabhossain

3 hours ago

This is alright until you understand that the data is going through a 3rd party AI provider for their data training, but this is not what a user intentionally wants

taldo

11 hours ago

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.

pizzafeelsright

9 hours ago

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.

cjimesh

3 hours ago

Whatsapp chats can contain lots of confidential stuff. Theoretically a cool project, but I won't be using this for sure.

buremba

8 hours ago

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.

neuropacabra

5 hours ago

Free messaging MCP. What could possibly go wrong?

fantasticwaddle

6 hours ago

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.

jrecyclebin

11 hours ago

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...

bitilia

10 hours ago

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.

kshmir

8 hours ago

Much safer to just use Meta Business Agent, avoids bans.

calmingsolitude

4 hours ago

This post is quite disingenuous. Both the title and body talk about it being free, but the actual readme on the repo says:

> […] default CPU limit on Workers is too small for it. wrangler.jsonc raises it, and raising it needs the paid plan, which is a few dollars a month. I haven't tried the free plan.

https://github.com/finereli/whatsapp-mcp/tree/64f1b3017931e4...