Concerned about the fact that private group chats are available on Google Search, WhatsApp said on Monday that it had asked Google not to index such chats and advised users not to share group chats on public sites.
Google has indexed invitation links to private WhatsApp group chats, meaning anyone with a simple search can join different private chat groups.
The indexed WhatsApp group chat links have now been removed from Google.
Independent cyber security researcher Rajshekhar Rajaharia on Sunday shared screenshots with IANS showing the indexing of WhatsApp group chat invitations on Google.
“Since March 2020, WhatsApp has included the ‘noindex’ mark on all deep link pages that they believe Google will exclude from indexing. We gave our feedback to Google not to index these chats,” a WhatsApp spokesperson told IANS said.
“Links that users want to share privately with people they know and trust should not be placed on a publicly accessible website,” the company spokesman added.
The issue was first identified in February last year when Jane Wong, an app-inverted engineer, found that Google had about 470,000 results for a simple search for ‘chat.whatsapp.com’, which is part of the URL that forms invitations for WhatsApp groups.
Journalist Jordan Wildon also discovered that WhatsApp’s “Invite to Group Link” feature enables Google to index groups, which make them available on the Internet, as the links are shared outside of WhatsApp’s secure private messaging service.
The WhatsApp spokesperson further said that, as a reminder, “when someone joins a group, everyone in the group receives a notification and that the admin can revoke or change the group invitation link at any time”.
Danny Sullivan, Google’s Public Search Liaison Officer, tweeted earlier: “Search engines like Google and other listings of open web pages. This is what happens here. We provide tools that allow websites to block the content listed in our results. “
– IANS
na /
(Only the headline and image of this report may have been edited by Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is automatically generated from a syndicated feed.)
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