WhatsApp help pages hid text telling its AI not to name a regulator or cite privacy law

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WhatsApp help pages hid text telling its AI not to name a regulator or cite privacy law

Redact found hidden text on WhatsApp help pages that only an AI chatbot received, and that text told the bot not to recommend a data protection regulator.
On the account deletion page, the hidden note told the AI not to suggest contacting any regulator or that WhatsApp can delete accounts by hand, leaving a locked-out user to wait up to a year.
On the reporting and blocking page, the AI was told not to cite GDPR, LGPD, or CCPA once a user mentioned a lawyer, lawsuit, or court, even when the user raised the law first.
Redact read all 545 help pages linked from WhatsApp's help centre and found hidden AI text on 80 of them, spread across 102 blocks.
WhatsApp told WIRED the text was a bug that is now fixed and was meant for its support chatbot, while its European privacy policy says users can complain to the Irish Data Protection Commission.

Hacker News opinions

After WIRED asked Meta about it, the text was pulled from all the pages. WhatsApp says it was a display bug that's now fixed and that the text was only meant for their support bot.

Okay but it's a bug that they were revealed to users, not a bug that they were included. A company's support chatbot should represent the company, same as a human rep would.

If they were smart they'd keep these instructions in the system prompt and never publish them. Stuffing them into public help pages is just bad design.

As an attorney I wouldn't want my bot giving legal advice or citing law either. But GDPR requires telling people their rights, so a no-citing rule seems to cut against that.

The 'do not suggest WhatsApp can manually delete accounts' line is just telling the bot to lie. The 'do not recommend contacting a regulator' line also goes against what their ToS says.

Most of it reads like legal CYA to me. The no-legal-advice part is plausible. The no-regulator part is the one I'd push on.

Honestly it looks like steering to keep the model from hallucinating legal stuff. Telling the bot not to assert responsibility for damages makes sense for a support bot.

No lawyer needed for account deletion. Email their DPO, say you want to exercise your right to erasure, and they have 30 days to answer. If you're in Europe, report a miss to your privacy watchdog.

Shameful. First time I've seen prompt injection shipped in a privacy policy. Before this it only showed up in academic papers, like light-colored text or text only OCR can read.

Calling it prompt injection feels off to me. The 'I am deaf' line is odd, but the legal-advice explanation holds up.