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Show HN: WhatsApp MCP running free on Cloudflare

41 points zoozla 4 hours ago 23 comments

I wanted my humble Claude on mobile to access my WhatsApp messages but the only options I could find either required WhatsApp Business or an actual server to run Baileys on.

I wanted to run it for free on ClaudeFlare and with my personal WhatsApp account, so I built this.

Important feature - it connects to your Google account as well as WhatsApp to grab the names of all your WhatsApp contacts, otherwise you get only phone numbers for many of them and search doesn't work properly.

This is a single user install because it's both gray area and very private - so point your agent at the repo and let it set things up.

D2OQZG8l5BI1S06 2 hours ago | parent

Cloudflare already sniffs most of the internet traffic, why not also let them see our private messages?!

SchemaLoad 2 hours ago | parent

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.

WrtCdEvrydy 2 hours ago | parent

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 1 hour ago | parent

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

doesnt_know 2 hours ago | parent

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.

j45 1 hour ago | parent

It hasn't since long sailed.

jimkleiber 1 hour ago | parent

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 58 minutes ago | parent

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 50 minutes ago | parent

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

palata 1 hour ago | parent

> 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?

_ink_ 2 hours ago | parent

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

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

throwaway27448 2 hours ago | parent

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

dvt 2 hours ago | parent

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

delijati 1 hour ago | parent

use muse so it stays in house /s

ceejayoz 1 hour ago | parent

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

palata 1 hour ago | parent

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.

jrecyclebin 2 hours ago | parent

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...

goodcake3963 2 hours ago | parent

Let's centralize the internet even more, why not

taldo 2 hours ago | parent

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.

throwaway27448 2 hours ago | parent

What does cloudflare contribute? free hosting or

throwaway27448 2 hours ago | parent

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?

bitilia 1 hour ago | parent

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.

pizzafeelsright 47 minutes ago | parent

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.