WhatsApp Hid Instructions in Help Pages Telling Its AI Chatbot Not to Recommend Privacy Regulators
Summary: WhatsApp's help pages carried hidden code instructions telling its support chatbot not to recommend a data protection authority or regulator to users who could no longer delete their accounts, and not to cite laws such as the GDPR once a user mentioned a lawyer, lawsuit, or court. Redact, the data-deletion software company that found the text on October 8, read all 545 pages linked by WhatsApp's help center and counted 102 hidden blocks across 80 of them; WhatsApp told WIRED the instructions were for the chatbot and appeared in the pages because of a bug, now fixed, and all 102 blocks were removed by October 18.
Bottom line: WhatsApp's own Europe privacy policy, effective July 2, 2026, tells users they have the right to complain to the Irish Data Protection Commission or any other competent authority under GDPR Article 77 - the same right the hidden text steered the chatbot away from. The blocks sat in page HTML under the name HelpContentGalaxyLLMInclude and were sent to Google's and Bing's crawlers, so anyone viewing page source could read instructions users were never shown.
Read the original at The Hacker News ↗
- Topics
- Privacy
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