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Show HN: WhatsApp MCP running free on Cloudflare (github.com)

2 points by zoozla ↗ HN
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.

101 comments

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D2OQZG8l5BI1S06
Cloudflare already sniffs most of the internet traffic, why not also let them see our private messages?!
SchemaLoad
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
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
There is a big difference between leaking the contacts (that is, metadata) and the conversations themselves.
doesnt_know
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
It hasn't since long sailed.
jimkleiber
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
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
There's a difference between small scale screenshotting certain conversations, and wholesale vacuuming up everything in to the AI machine.
hamburglar
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
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
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.
ale42
Well, then not at all...
anonreplier
So you're saying DRM is good now?
hamburglar
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.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
palata
> 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?

LoganDark
> 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 secret of information and sometimes not even for that.

FWIW the only thing I've used PGP for in many years is encrypting my home address when buying darknet drugs

random2021
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 ...

palata
> Most people are not in Signal

So what? WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted. Signal is better (e.g. because the client is open source), but security is a gradient. WhatsApp is better than Telegram in terms of security.

> but then install Google Maps

Again, it's a gradient. Sure, they leak some data, but at least they don't leak all the content of all their messages. Or would you say that if you leak your name on the Internet, you may as well publish your sextape because "now everybody knows your name, you have nothing to hide anymore"?

> How many managers are uploading Excel sheets?

So because my company leaks my work documents to Microsoft means that I should leak the content of the messages I send to my partner? How do you get to that conclusion?

> finally govt will lose their passport database and ...

Right. And it is a known fact that when the government loses their passport database, suddenly your private pictures appear on the public Internet! /s

random2021
plenty of reports on the web (citizen Lab) reporting that targeted decryption happens for Whatsapp.
BorisMelnik
the ship has long sailed but there is a massive supertanker way worse and we don't have to make it easier on them
franga2000
There has always been the possibility that people would do dumb things with email they receive, but it wasn't a widespread thing to do, there weren't many reasons to do them and the tools weren't easily accessible to most people.

But LLM agents are really useful and the tools to give one access to your entire digital life is just an OAuth prompt away.

throwaway27448
The complete disintegration of the concept of intellectual property seems worth it
dvt
This ship has sailed about two decades ago. At least let's get some cool products out of it.
delijati
use muse so it stays in house /s
ceejayoz
They're using a Facebook product. The privacy damage already occurred.
palata
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.

SXX
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.

palata
> Its still preferable to use Signal since now it actually supports numberless registration.

It's preferable to use Signal because they don't collect as much metadata as WhatsApp, and the client is open source.

I don't care so much about the numberless registration. Actually I don't even understand why people care so much about it.

arshxyz
even if all meta employees see the source they cannot read messages as long as keys as generated on-device, which is verifiable
palata
My point was that all meta employees seeing the source means that there is a non-zero chance that one of them would realise if there was a backdoor.
MYEUHD
Is is end-to-end encrypted, but aren't chat history backups stored in plain text on some server?
simplesocieties
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.
jeroenhd
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.
palata
Sure. Also if you take a screenshot of every message and publish it on the Internet, then your messages will be public.
ale42
> 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).

palata
Sure, end-to-end encryption encrypts the data, it doesn't hide the metadata.
asciii
> 3rd party AI company who will ingest it

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

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

toppa33
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
port11
You’re gonna get a ton of “what about X” replies, which is sad, disappointing, and goes to show that people don’t understand the scale and severity of solutions like these.

What about… nothing. Nothing. A friend screenshotting an E2EE message is NOT even in the same world of trouble as an agentic automation over all their conversations.

But email… nope. Stop. A single person passing group chats to Claude will compromise the few hundred people in our parenting WhatsApp community.

dannyw
I think the problem here is Claude and third party AI services with trust-based training preferences.

I have a similar setup for my personal agent, except all inference runs on my local homelab and open weight models.

I see no ethical qualms to this. These people sent messages to me, and only I have access to it; I’m not sharing it with a third party.

embedding-shape
> You personally might not care about this privacy intrusion but the people you are messaging never consented to this.

The world always worked like this though, as soon as "data" is shared out from your head to the wider world, it has "leaked" and can no longer be considered secret. This was as true 100 years ago as it is today. The only secrets that can be kept, remains the ones you keep inside of your head and don't share with others.

sirenic
I use Gemini within the Gmail suite, and this happens without the knowledge of the people who send me emails... What solutions might be available to anonymize data sources?
lijuliju
You can always connect your MCP server to local AI or self-hosted AI

Even if you do connect to an AI company, you could also limit the blast area by using a control layer to limit the scopes, for example I built this so I can grant individual WhatsApp chats but not all of them: https://github.com/ju-li/automata-mcp

jrecyclebin
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...
dandaka
Telegram platform is above and beyond of what Whatsapp is offering. APIs for bot accounts and direct access to your own personal account.
nazcan
Matrix federated chat - who needs gatekeepers.
goodcake3963
Let's centralize the internet even more, why not
taldo
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.
nojvek
I think governments ought to take the proliferation of WA , or X in their countries seriously.

Open clients like Telegram make a lot more sense. WhatsApp is at the whim of Zuck's and whoever is ruling US's political inclination on what is allowed or not.

That is not a great way to run a country. US corporations in many ways are like worms.

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

kshmir
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).
101008
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.
deadbabe
Not could, should. The people in his conversations didn’t consent to this. How can we report him?
beng-nl
That’s also what’s keeping me from connecting my WhatsApp to an AI - even readonly which would already be very powerful and useful.

Every now and again I sketch out an automatic iPhone backup over wireless workflow so I can extract the WhatsApp conversations once a day - which may be a good usability/tos-safety trade-off - but that may or may not be worth it.

febed
Can you share some more details about the backup workflow? Wouldn’t you end with a lot of redundant copies if you backup everyday?
buremba
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.

lgleason
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.

qingcharles
I just got the ban and had to appeal for trying to move my account from Android to iOS without knowing you are supposed to use an app named "Move to iOS". I don't want to go through that again, especially seeing as WhatsApp only has AI support.
jiggunjer
To anyone thinking of going the official route, beware twillio, their KYC is terrible.
fantasticwaddle
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.
neuropacabra
Free messaging MCP. What could possibly go wrong?
meherabhossain
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
cjimesh
Whatsapp chats can contain lots of confidential stuff. Theoretically a cool project, but I won't be using this for sure.
iamronaldo
Is there a risk to your WhatsApp account getting banned?