In February of this year, Google and WhatsApp garnered a ton of headlines when some public groups, along with chats and member information, started appearing in Google search results. Although the problem was later fixed and the groups were hidden, some WhatsApp groups and profiles have resurfaced, according to cybersecurity researcher Rajshekhar Rajaharia (via Gadgets 360).
This time, users’ phone numbers and profile pictures also appear, making the situation worse than before. All people need is the URL of the group and they can join by simply searching for it on Google.
It has been mentioned that the links allow users to join the groups and see participants along with their phone numbers and the messages they have shared. It’s not certain when exactly WhatsApp started indexing group chat invites on Google. However, the report adds that there were already about 1,500 group invite links in the search results.
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While some of the groups indexed by Google direct users to porn content, others are specific to particular user interests.
Rajaharia said Facebook’s instant messenger did not use a robots.txt file for the chat.whatsapp.com subdomain. Companies use robots.txt to prevent search crawlers from indexing content.
As for user profiles, Google has started showing users’ private accounts, along with their profile images and names, the report adds. It is possible to see user profiles by searching for country codes on the WhatsApp domain. It is reported that some 5,000 profiles have been made public for the time being. According to Rajaharia, WhatsApp does not use the robots.txt file here either.
Both WhatsApp and Google have not yet made any public statements.