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.
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 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.
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.
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).
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...
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.
Not like Meta is a saint...since they're competitors
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.
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?
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.
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.
* 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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43901204
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.