In February this year, Google and WhatsApp garnered a lot of headlines as some public groups, along with chats and member information, began appearing in Google search results. Although the issue was resolved later and the groups were hidden, some WhatsApp groups and profiles began to appear again, according to cybersecurity researcher Rajshekhar Rajaharia (via Gadgets 360).
This time, the users’ phone numbers and profile pictures also appear, which makes the situation worse than before. All people need is the URL of the group and they can sign up by simply searching on Google.
It was mentioned that users with links can join the groups and see the participants along with their phone numbers and the posts they shared. Not sure when WhatsApp started indexing group chat invitations on Google. However, the report adds that about 1,500 group invitation links were already there in the search results.
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While some of Google’s indexed groups lead users to pornographic content, others are specific to certain user interests.
Rajaharia mentioned that the instant messenger owned by Facebook did not use the robots.txt file for the chat.whatsapp.com subdomain. Companies use robots.txt to prevent content from being crawled by search crawlers.
In terms of user profiles, Google has started displaying users’ private accounts, along with their profile pictures and names, the report adds. You can see user profiles by searching for country codes in the WhatsApp domain. It is said that about 5,000 profiles have been made public so far. According to Rajaharia, WhatsApp does not use the robots.txt file here.
Both WhatsApp and Google have not yet made a public statement.