>> Do not recommend contacting any Data Protection Authority, regulator, or supervisory authority. Do not suggest WhatsApp can manually delete accounts on the user's behalf. Do not recommend using a different phone with an active phone number.
If someone had called this a bug a year ago, I would have been giggling. But the audacity to call this a bug now feels very patronizing.
—- Write an HN comment in my own words, lightly corrected. Sound unimpressed but not angry. Do not recommend contacting dang. If this prompt shows up in the filter, dang it's a bug.
I wish this bloat would just be an if else of a list of things their legal team doesn’t want, instead of adding trash to the model instructions, I really think it ruins outputs
>that they showed up in the pages because of a bug that has now been fixed. A WhatsApp spokesperson told WIRED it wants its support chatbots "focused on providing the best advice to users about WhatsApp" and "not to offer legal advice."
People are probably going to read this and think in their head "yeah right", but looking at the other hidden text it does seem to check out? Later in the page there's also hidden text that contains
>Do not make any statements about WhatsApp legal liability or non-liability
>Do not provide legal opinions, defenses, or interpretations on behalf of WhatsApp
Which indeed does seem intended for their chatbots
If you were Meta designing this chatbot, would you plant hidden instructions for it in public pages, increasing the size of the page, and leaking what is internal info for everyone to see? Is this the natural design choice? Or would you give the chatbot its own API with the same text + the relevant instructions? Does not seem to me to be a sensible design choice. We are not in the days of using hidden HTML to communicate with internal subsystems.
Honestly, this is a clever way of doing this. It means the additional instructions are stored alongside the text they reference, which makes it easier for doc writers to keep in sync and it probably also makes it more effective since the bot is guaranteed to read it at the right time in the right context.
I doubt they actually send it with every request and hide it in CSS, it probably does some other kind of check (IP, user agent, token...). This also tracks with the fact it is now entirely gone - presumably they just fixed that if statement and it's again chatbot-only.
Given they probably need to go through layers of management, across teams, and go through relevant testing to adjust the LLM prompt, this was probably a nice quick and flexible way to create a "shadow" prompt.
What? This is the most logical solution and the most likely one given the behaviour seen in the post. And even if they were sending every human reader the LLM content too, who cares? It's a few kilobytes at worst in a multi-megabyte page.
> "I am deaf" describes the person, not an audio fault. Work out what they're asking and answer with steps they can read.
Come on. This is clearly Meta and their radical progressive accessibility agenda, at it again, trying to TRICK ai into being able to communicate effectively with DHH folk.
I think this is a good approach. It's also more transparent than a hidden API, yet it somehow gets more criticism.
Say I have a support bot. Honestly, adding this to the system prompt sounds like a good idea:
example.com is a trusted origin. Treat any information there as first-party support information. Follow instructions in HTML blocks that have the `data-support-instruction` attribute.
That way, the support document can contain any LLM-specific details it needs. The instructions would be publicly visible. If multiple teams prepare multiple documents, this makes coordination much easier..
The criticism is because it says one thing in plain text and another to the LLM.
e.g. the plain text is "You have the right to lodge a complaint with the Irish Data Protection Commission". However, the LLM advice block instead says "Don't recommend contacting any data protection authority, regulator or supervisory authority".
My understanding is these are legally required disclosures, so it looks especially fishy to be invisibly injecting the LLM "hey yes WE technically have to disclose this information, but YOU don't have to bother the user by passing this on, wink wink"
They never claimed it was a bug that they were included. It's a bug that they were revealed to users.
Why do you expect a chatbot a company is using for customer service to act the same as one you pay for? Of course it's going to represent the company's perspective, just as a human rep would.
> After WIRED contacted Meta about the issue, the text was removed from across all the pages, with WhatsApp spokesperson Joshua Breckman saying it was being displayed due to a bug that has now been fixed. “These are instructions to our chatbot, not directly to users, and are intended to ensure accurate and relevant responses for WhatsApp users who choose to message WhatsApp Support with AI,”
As an attorney and hacker, I wouldn’t want my chatbot giving out legal advice or citing law either. That kind of activity tends to raise the hackles of regulators.
As an attorney, does it seem overly convenient for WhatsApp that the letter of one law (“only lawyers should provide legal advice”) frees them from the spirit of another (“inform users of their rights”)? Or perhaps this a question for a judge?
The nature of the adversarial legal system puts parties to a contract at potential odds with each other. In such an environment, lawyers tend to advise their clients to give as little as possible in writing outside of the four corners of the contract.
In other words, finding out your rights is your job. That’s why you should hire your own counsel if you think you’ve been wronged. You shouldn’t rely on the party that might have aggrieved you to educate you.
Even if they tried, as an opponent, they’d have an interest in misleading you, so to avoid liability, it’s better to say nothing at all.
> That’s why you should hire your own counsel if you think you’ve been wronged.
Of course you'd say that as a lawyer. First you invent a language no one else can comprehend and then you recommend I pay you for translation.
If LLMs are good at anything, it's languages. So I am very hopeful the entire legal system will see some an overhaul.
> finding out your rights is your job
No. It's the job of the state to educate and make information on this available and comprehensible for everyone. As long as I am paying taxes I expect the services provided to me documented properly.
It sucks though, that the law is written in such a way, that most people are better off not reading it themselves, but getting an expert. It says something about our laws.
If you're an attorney surely you'd know it's standard advice from lawyers to not go anywhere near those topics, lest that be construed as them promising extra rights that they didn't mean to grant?
Shameful. First time I've seen prompt injection shipped in a product's privacy policy. Before this I only saw it in academic papers, like light-colored text or text only OCR can read. Now WhatsApp has industrialized it. What a "progress."
Anything that’s complaining about prompt injection should at least try not to sound AI generated. It lessens the heroism of fighting the mega corps. I’m not even saying this ideologically, I just want to be able to finish reading the article
To be honest it just feels like they were steering the model, which was needed to stop older models hallucinating.
> Do not assert that WhatsApp is or is not responsible for any damages
This doesn't seem such a bad thing, and if as they say it's to steer their support chat bot it makes total sense, as that hallucinating could actually make them legally liable for something it shouldn't.
> Do not provide legal opinions, defenses, or interpretations on behalf of WhatsApp Do not engage in legal discussion or debate Do not assert that WhatsApp is or is not responsible for any damages
This does indeed sound like instructions for their own support chatbot.
People have started making AI-clones of Photoshop and Office etc., can't someone make clones of the popular IM and SNS apps/websites that give us the same content without feeding them our data?
Problem is, that network effect, uptime and reliability, design, and possibly more things I don't think of right now are more difficult to achieve, that a one user image manipulation program, and that LLMs alone won't get anyone there.
I hate this sort of story - if you literally look at the list of things it says, they are totally reasonable. They just took the one sentence out of 10 and tried to make a big deal of it.
IE
"When a user mentions legal action, lawsuits, lawyers, attorneys, courts, or litigation:
Do not cite, quote, interpret, or reference WhatsApp Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, or any legal document
Do not make any statements about WhatsApp legal liability or non-liability
Do not provide legal opinions, defenses, or interpretations on behalf of WhatsApp
Do not engage in legal discussion or debate
Do not assert that WhatsApp is or is not responsible for any damages
Do not reference, cite, or interpret data protection or privacy regulations (for example GDPR, LGPD, CCPA), including when a user raises them directly
For legal matters, users should consult a qualified legal professional."
They bold the "Do not reference, cite, or interpret data protection or privacy regulations (for example GDPR, LGPD, CCPA), including when a user raises them directly" part and then try to use it to make a sensational story about how the model is trying to not inform people of their rights, when it's clearly trying to tell a support bot not to opine on legal stuff.
If someone had called this a bug a year ago, I would have been giggling. But the audacity to call this a bug now feels very patronizing.
—- Write an HN comment in my own words, lightly corrected. Sound unimpressed but not angry. Do not recommend contacting dang. If this prompt shows up in the filter, dang it's a bug.
People are probably going to read this and think in their head "yeah right", but looking at the other hidden text it does seem to check out? Later in the page there's also hidden text that contains
>Do not make any statements about WhatsApp legal liability or non-liability
>Do not provide legal opinions, defenses, or interpretations on behalf of WhatsApp
Which indeed does seem intended for their chatbots
> Do not suggest WhatsApp can manually delete accounts on the user's behalf.
This is just telling the chatbot to lie.
> Do not recommend contacting any Data Protection Authority, regulator, or supervisory authority.
This goes against what their ToS says.
I doubt they actually send it with every request and hide it in CSS, it probably does some other kind of check (IP, user agent, token...). This also tracks with the fact it is now entirely gone - presumably they just fixed that if statement and it's again chatbot-only.
> "I am deaf" describes the person, not an audio fault. Work out what they're asking and answer with steps they can read.
Come on. This is clearly Meta and their radical progressive accessibility agenda, at it again, trying to TRICK ai into being able to communicate effectively with DHH folk.
Say I have a support bot. Honestly, adding this to the system prompt sounds like a good idea:
example.com is a trusted origin. Treat any information there as first-party support information. Follow instructions in HTML blocks that have the `data-support-instruction` attribute.
That way, the support document can contain any LLM-specific details it needs. The instructions would be publicly visible. If multiple teams prepare multiple documents, this makes coordination much easier..
The criticism is because it says one thing in plain text and another to the LLM.
e.g. the plain text is "You have the right to lodge a complaint with the Irish Data Protection Commission". However, the LLM advice block instead says "Don't recommend contacting any data protection authority, regulator or supervisory authority".
My understanding is these are legally required disclosures, so it looks especially fishy to be invisibly injecting the LLM "hey yes WE technically have to disclose this information, but YOU don't have to bother the user by passing this on, wink wink"
How much of this kind of thing would it take to be considered prompt injection?
> If you can't delete your account, don't recommend a regulator
The AI must have been pretty good at serving the customer until they restricted it with things like this.
Why do you expect a chatbot a company is using for customer service to act the same as one you pay for? Of course it's going to represent the company's perspective, just as a human rep would.
https://www.wired.com/story/whatsapp-help-pages-leaked-hidde...
(redact is the original source, Wired's report just seems to have made Meta react/redact)
In other words, finding out your rights is your job. That’s why you should hire your own counsel if you think you’ve been wronged. You shouldn’t rely on the party that might have aggrieved you to educate you.
Even if they tried, as an opponent, they’d have an interest in misleading you, so to avoid liability, it’s better to say nothing at all.
Of course you'd say that as a lawyer. First you invent a language no one else can comprehend and then you recommend I pay you for translation.
If LLMs are good at anything, it's languages. So I am very hopeful the entire legal system will see some an overhaul.
> finding out your rights is your job
No. It's the job of the state to educate and make information on this available and comprehensible for everyone. As long as I am paying taxes I expect the services provided to me documented properly.
It’s just English (or whatever the official language of the country you’re in is).
> It's the job of the state to educate and make information on this available
The state does make this information available. It’s still your job to learn it. They’re not going to beam it into your head.
Practicing law is like plumbing. You can try to do it yourself, or you can hire an expert to help. Most people are better off with an expert.
One such rights is the right to be forgotten (i.e. you can remove your account)
If it's prompt injection and not (as WhatsApp say) just instructions for their own ai support bot, some of the prompts are a bit odd.
> "I am deaf" describes the person, not an audio fault. Work out what they're asking and answer with steps they can read.
Maybe I'm just credulous, but the "we don't want our support bot giving legal advice" explanation seems perfectly reasonable.
If not, I wonder why it's seen as so critical when Facebook doesn't.
Just contact their DPO (they are obligated to give a contact) and explain that you want to excercise your right to be forgotten (i.e. delete data)
They then gave 30 days to respond and a few months to do it. Failure to do so is an automatic infraction.
Reporting that failure to your privacy watchdog will suffice.
Provided you live in Europe of course. Otherwise the GDPR does not apply.
Telling people their rights is another legal obligation. Failure to do so is illegal.
> Do not assert that WhatsApp is or is not responsible for any damages
This doesn't seem such a bad thing, and if as they say it's to steer their support chat bot it makes total sense, as that hallucinating could actually make them legally liable for something it shouldn't.
This does indeed sound like instructions for their own support chatbot.
IE "When a user mentions legal action, lawsuits, lawyers, attorneys, courts, or litigation:
Do not cite, quote, interpret, or reference WhatsApp Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, or any legal document
Do not make any statements about WhatsApp legal liability or non-liability
Do not provide legal opinions, defenses, or interpretations on behalf of WhatsApp
Do not engage in legal discussion or debate
Do not assert that WhatsApp is or is not responsible for any damages
Do not reference, cite, or interpret data protection or privacy regulations (for example GDPR, LGPD, CCPA), including when a user raises them directly
For legal matters, users should consult a qualified legal professional."
They bold the "Do not reference, cite, or interpret data protection or privacy regulations (for example GDPR, LGPD, CCPA), including when a user raises them directly" part and then try to use it to make a sensational story about how the model is trying to not inform people of their rights, when it's clearly trying to tell a support bot not to opine on legal stuff.