In February of this year, Google and WhatsApp collected several headlines as some public groups, along with chats and member information, began to appear in Google’s search results. Although the problem was resolved later and the groups were hidden, some WhatsApp groups and profiles have reappeared, according to cybersecurity researcher Rajshekhar Rajaharia (via Gadgets 360).
This time, phone numbers and user profile photos are also appearing, making the situation even worse. All people need is the group’s URL and can simply enter by searching on Google.
It was mentioned that users with the links can join groups and can see participants along with their phone numbers and the posts they have shared. It is unclear exactly when WhatsApp started indexing group chat invitations on Google. However, the report adds that about 1,500 group invitation links were already there in the search results.
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While some of the groups indexed by Google lead users to pornographic content, others are specific to some of the user’s interests.
Rajaharia mentioned that the Facebook-owned instant messenger was not using the robots.txt file for the chat.whatsapp.com subdomain. Businesses use robots.txt to prevent search crawlers from indexing content.
As for user profiles, Google has started showing private user accounts along with their profile pictures and names, the report adds. It is possible to see the profiles of users by searching the country codes in the WhatsApp domain. It is estimated that around 5,000 profiles have been made public so far. According to Rajaharia, WhatsApp is not using the robots.txt file here either.
Both WhatsApp and Google have yet to make public statements.