whatsapp on S Anand

A cynical view of WhatsApp's Advanced Privacy

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 14:13:47 +0530

WhatsApp has an Advanced privacy mode they launched in Apr 2025. People in the chat:

Can’t ask Meta AI to answer questions, or to create images or summaries in this chat.
Cynical view: When regulators clamp down AI or users complain about AI, Meta can say “We asked users and they gave permission!”
Can’t export the chat.
Cynical view: When regulators force Meta to be inter-operable with Signal, Telegram, etc. Meta can say “Users don’t want to export their chats!” Also, easier to tell businesses “You can disable exports - less litigation risk”.
Can’t save media to their device gallery automatically.
Cynical view: When you want to switch to Telegram, Signal, these photos can’t be exported - so you have to stay on WhatsApp.

People skills with AI

Sun, 17 May 2026 22:45:57 +0800

I advise people that people skills are important in the AI era.

Now, I’m using AI to help me with people skills.

This morning, I wrote a script to export my WhatsApp conversations this year. That makes it easy to feed it into AI models.

Then I used my Local MCP connector and asked Claude:

Who are people in my life that most deserve an unreasonable gesture of thanks and what would that be?

It went through my WhatsApp messages – including threads I had not read. Including a group discussing four 90-minute hands-on AI workshops I’m running for IIM alumni in Singapore on Saturday afternoons:

23 May: Context engineering
20 Jun: AI tools & workflows
25 Jul: Agentic analysis
22 Aug: AI strategy

Nayana Jain prepared a series of LinkedIn / WhatsApp posts to promote this workshop series and also created a poster for the workshops - and the best part of it was they were AI-generated. AI didn’t do a great job at the logo, so she asked for and got the IIMPACT logo (which isn’t public) and fed it to the model to re-generate it.

All of this is something I wasn’t even aware of until Claude pointed it out.

I sent a note thanking her.

And, evidently, AI is teaching me how to be human.

Tue, 01 Jul 2025 04:07:38 +0000

I catch up on long WhatsApp group discussions as podcasts.

The quick way is to scroll on WhatsApp Web, select all, paste into NotebookLM, and create the podcast.

Mine is a bit more complicated. Here’s an example:

Use a bookmarklet to scrape the messages https://tools.s-anand.net/whatsappscraper/
Generate a 2-person script https://github.com/sanand0/generative-ai-group/blob/main/config.toml
Have gpt-4o-mini-tts convert each line using a different voice https://www.openai.fm/
Combine using ffmpeg https://ffmpeg.org/
Publish on GitHub Releases https://github.com/sanand0/generative-ai-group/releases/tag/main

I run this every week. So far, it’s proved quite enlightening.