WhatsApp group invite links started showing up again on Google and so anyone can find and join the private groups on a google search.
Nithya Satheesh
credits: Google Play
We all have a WhatsApp account and we all are in lot of groups, whether it be a family group, friends group or work related group. We have several of them. And thus we don't want a random person to have access to our chats, profile pictures, details of other group members and phone numbers.
WhatsApp group invite links started showing up again on Google and so anyone can find and join the private groups on a google search and can get the details of anyone in the group. This same issue has happened once in the past in November 2019 where the WhatsApp group invites were initially found on Google search results and was removed when the issue became public in February 2020. On March 2020, after this issue had occurred WhatsApp told that they have included the ‘noindex’ tag for all its deep link pages and Google will exclude these links from indexing. And whenever someone joins a group everyone in that group will receives a message as a reminder and the admin can change the group invite link at any time.
Security researcher Rajshekhar Rajaharia, shared the screenshot of the indexing group chat WhatsApp invites on Google with IANS on Sundays. When he shared about this, there were more than 1,500 group invite links available in Google search results. He told that web developers usually use robots.txt file that tells search engines like Google which pages they can crawl and which should not be used for indexing. Till now, WhatsApp has not used the robots.txt file for their subdomain chat.whatsapp.com which leads to the indexation of group chat invitations on Google.
On Monday, WhatsApp stated that they asked Google not to index these chats and advised users not to share group chat links on websites available to the public. WhatsApp indexed group chat links have now been withdrawn from Google.