Concerned that private group chat links are available in Google Search, WhatsApp said Monday that it asked Google not to index such chats and advised users not to share group chat links on sites. publicly accessible web.
Google has indexed invitation links to WhatsApp private group chats, which means that anyone can join different private chat groups with a simple search.
WhatsApp group chat indexed links have now been removed from Google.
Independent cybersecurity researcher Rajshekhar Rajaharia shared screenshots on Sunday with the IANS showing the indexing of WhatsApp group chat invitations on Google.
“Since March 2020, WhatsApp has included the ‘noindex’ tag on all pages of deep links that, according to Google, will exclude them from indexing. We have given our feedback to Google not to index these chats,” said a carrier WhatsApp for IANS.
“Links that users want to share privately with people they know and trust should not be posted on a publicly accessible site,” the company spokesman added.
The problem first appeared in February last year, when Jane Wong, a reverse engineer, discovered that Google has about 470,000 results for a simple search of “chat.whatsapp.com”, a part of the URL that makes up invitations to groups. WhatsApp.
Journalist Jordan Wildon also found that WhatsApp’s “Invite to Group Link” feature allows Google’s index groups, making them available on the Internet because the links are distributed outside WhatsApp’s secure private messaging service.
The WhatsApp spokesman also said that, as a reminder, “whenever someone joins a group, everyone in that group receives a notification and the administrator can revoke or change the group invitation link at any time.”
Danny Sullivan, Google’s public search link, had posted on Twitter earlier: “Search engines like Google and others list pages on the open web. That’s what’s happening here. It is no different that a site allows the public listing of URLs. We provide tools that allow sites to block the content listed in our results. “
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(Only the title and image of this report may have been rewritten by Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is automatically generated from a syndicated feed.)
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