Concerned that links to private group chats are available on Google Search, WhatsApp said on Monday that they have asked Google not to index such chats and advised users not to share group chat links on publicly accessible websites.
Google had indexed invite links to private WhatsApp group chats, which means anyone can join different private chat groups with a simple search.
The indexed WhatsApp group chat links have now been removed from Google.
Independent cybersecurity researcher Rajshekhar Rajaharia shared screenshots with IANS on Sunday showing the indexing of WhatsApp group chat invites on Google.
“As of March 2020, WhatsApp has included the” noindex “tag on all deep link pages, excluding them from indexing, according to Google. We have given our feedback to Google not to index these chats,” a WhatsApp spokesperson told 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 spokesperson.
The problem first surfaced in February last year when app reverse engineer Jane Wong discovered that Google had about 470,000 results for a simple search for “chat.whatsapp.com”, part of the URL that forms invitations to WhatsApp groups.
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 the links are shared outside WhatsApp’s secure private messaging service.
The WhatsApp spokesperson went on to say that as a reminder, “when someone joins a group, everyone in that group will be notified and the administrator can revoke or change the invite link for the group at any time”.
Danny Sullivan, Google’s public search contact, had previously tweeted, “Search engines like Google and others list pages from the open web. That’s what happens here. It’s no different from any case where a site allows URLs to be listed publicly. We do provide tools that allow sites to block content listed in our results. “
–IANS
On /
(Only the header and image of this report may have been reworked by Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is automatically generated from a syndicated feed.)
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