It has been mentioned that users with the links can join the groups and can see participants along with their phone numbers and the posts that they have shared.
This time users’ phone numbers and profile pictures are also showing up, making the situation worse than before. All people need is the URL of the group and they can join by simply searching it on Google.
It has been mentioned that users with the links can join the groups and can see participants along with their phone numbers and the posts that they have shared. It is not for sure when exactly WhatsApp has started indexing group chat invites on Google. However, the report adds that around 1,500 group invite links were already there on search results.
Also read: Don’t know about your messages, but your WhatsApp Pay details are safe, as per the pay policy
While some of the groups indexed by Google leads the users to porn content, others are specific to some user interests.
Rajaharia mentioned that the Facebook-owned instant messenger was not using robots.txt file for chat.whatsapp.com subdomain. Companies use robots.txt to prevent search crawlers from indexing content.
As for user profiles, Google has started showing up private accounts of users along with their profile images and names, adds the report. It is possible to see user profiles by searching for country codes on WhatsApp's domain. Some 5,000 profiles are said to have been made public for now. According to Rajaharia, WhatsApp is not using the robots.txt file here as well.
Both WhatsApp and Google have not made any public statements yet.
0 Comments