A few days after launching its new policy forcing users to share their data with Facebook, WhatsApp suffered an embarrassing privacy violation, with its private chat groups being indexed in the Google search engine.
The breach of privacy was reported on Sunday. Invite links to WhatsApp private message groups, as well as some user profiles, have been indexed by Google and have appeared in search results, which basically means that anyone could go into supposedly secure chats and see the chats and phone numbers related.
The problem was promptly resolved by WhatsApp, and the exposed links disappeared from the search results. The problem appeared to have been similar to a privacy violation of chats and user information reported in early 2020.
In the company’s statement on the breach, she insisted that the app’s security has improved a lot since the leak last year and implied that users themselves were to blame for the Google splash over the weekend.
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“Since March 2020, WhatsApp has included the ‘noindex’ tag on all direct link pages, which, according to Google, will exclude them from being indexed.” he told Gadgets 360 oultet, urging users not to post invitation links anywhere publicly accessible to keep them away from search engines.
Like all content shared on searchable public channels, invitation links posted publicly on the internet can be found by other WhatsApp users. Links that users want to share privately with people they know and trust should not be posted on a publicly accessible website.
The incident comes days after WhatsApp launched its new highly controversial policy, forcing users to share their private data with their parent company, Facebook, or to leave the platform if they do not consent. The company said that the information collected would be used to “Helping to operate, provide, improve, understand, customize, support and market our services.” He acknowledged that he monitors users’ content to “Fight spam, threats, abuse or infringing activities” and “improve” the WhatsApp experience.
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The controversial rules provoked a massive exodus of Messenger users, with their rivals – Telegram, as well as Signal – enjoying a consequent increase in popularity.
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