Concerned about the availability of private group chat links on Google Search, WhatsApp said on Monday that it asked Google not to index such chats and advised users not to share group chat links on publicly accessible sites.
Google has indexed invitation links to chats from private WhatsApp groups, meaning that anyone can join multiple private chat groups with a simple search.
The indexed WhatsApp group chat links have been removed from Google.
Independent cybersecurity researcher Rajshekhar Rajaharia on Sunday shared screenshots with the IANS showing the indexing of WhatsApp group chat invitations on Google.
“Since March 2020, WhatsApp has included the tag” noindex “on all deep link pages that, according to Google, will exclude them from being indexed. We gave our feedback to Google not to index these chats,” said a spokesman voice from WhatsApp to IANS.
“Links that users want to share privately with people they know and trust should not be posted on a publicly accessible website,” added the company’s spokesman.
The problem first came up in February last year, when reverse application engineer Jane Wong discovered that Google had about 470,000 results for a simple search for “chat.whatsapp.com”, part of the URL that makes up group invitations WhatsApp.
Journalist Jordan Wildon also found that WhatsApp’s “Invite to group link” feature allows Google to index groups, making them available on the Internet, as links are being shared outside of WhatsApp’s secure private messaging service.
The WhatsApp spokesman also said that, as a reminder, “whenever someone joins a group, everyone in that group receives a warning and the administrator can revoke or change the group’s invitation link at any time.”
Danny Sullivan, Google’s public search representative, tweeted earlier: “Search engines like Google and others list web pages open. That’s what’s happening here. It’s no different than any case where a website allows URLs to be publicly listed. We offer tools that allow sites to block the content listed in our results. “
–IANS
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(Only the title and image of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard team; the rest of the content is automatically generated from a distributed feed.)
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