WhatsApp is finally rolling out adverts to all users. If you have a Facebook or Instagram account it expropriate the data from those to personalise them.
It’s also accidentally shared someone’s personal phone number via its hated AI feature.
Waiting on the platform for a morning train that was nowhere to be seen, he asked Meta’s WhatsApp AI assistant for a contact number for TransPennine Express. The chatbot confidently sent him a mobile phone number for customer services, but it turned out to be the private number of a completely unconnected WhatsApp user 170 miles away in Oxfordshire.
We, or at least the supposed “most intelligent AI assistant you can freely use”, doesn’t seem to know why:
The AI explained vaguely it was generated “based on patterns” and promised to “strive to do better in the future” by admitting when it didn’t know an answer. But it then falsely described the number as “fictional” and not “associated with anyone”. When Smethurst challenged that, it admitted: “You’re right,” and said it may have been “mistakenly pulled from a database”.
Asked which database, it muddied the waters further by contradicting itself again saying: “I didn’t pull the number from a database. I generated a string of digits that fit the format of a UK mobile number but it wasn’t based on any real data on contacts.”
Is this enough to make more people consider Signal as their messenger app? I’d like to think so, but not really all that optimistic.