Yet another Hacker News

Show HN: WhatsApp MCP running free on Cloudflare

26 points zoozla 2 hours ago 16 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 1 hour ago | parent

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

SchemaLoad 1 hour 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 55 minutes 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.

doesnt_know 48 minutes 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 7 minutes ago | parent

It hasn't since long sailed.

jimkleiber 4 minutes 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.

_ink_ 36 minutes ago | parent

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

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

throwaway27448 35 minutes ago | parent

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

dvt 33 minutes ago | parent

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

delijati 32 minutes ago | parent

use muse so it stays in house /s

ceejayoz 6 minutes ago | parent

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

jrecyclebin 1 hour 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 1 hour ago | parent

Let's centralize the internet even more, why not

taldo 52 minutes 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 36 minutes ago | parent

What does cloudflare contribute? free hosting or

throwaway27448 32 minutes 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?