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| Links to private WhatsApp groups are shown via Google |
If you search on Google again, it will show WhatsApp groups so that anyone can find and join private WhatsApp groups after searching in Google.
This was first discovered in 2019 and appears to have been fixed last year after it was released.
Another old issue that appears to be fixed but is recurring is showing user accounts in search results.
Due to this problem, users can view their phone number and profile picture by doing a simple search on Google.
By indexing group chat invitations, WhatsApp offers many private groups on the web and anyone can access their links with a simple Google search.
People who find these links can join the group and view the participants, their phone numbers, and messages sent to those groups.
Cybersecurity researcher Rajshekhar Rajaharia revealed an index of WhatsApp group chat invitations via Google.
The index seems to have restarted recently, and at the time of writing, there are already over 1500 group invitation links in the search results.
Some links indexed by Google lead to WhatsApp groups sharing porn content. In other cases, there are WhatsApp groups links that are specifically directed towards specific communities or interests.
People who were not invited can easily join the group using the link.
It should be noted that this is not the first time that this issue has occurred because invitations to WhatsApp group chats were found in Google search results in November 2019.
The issue was reported to Facebook by security researchers, although the issue was resolved shortly after it was reported by several news outlets in February of last year.
Engineer Jane Manchun Wong reports that WhatsApp resolved the group chat indexing issue by adding the invite link to the meta tag noindex. However, the most recent links contain the meta tag for the brand noindex.
It appears that the group chat link revealed in 2019 cannot be viewed by Google. So it might be another problem that led to similar results, or it might unintentionally cause a change to an old problem. Problem.
Security researchers said: The chat.whatsapp.com subdomain does not contain the robots.txt file, which indexes group chat invitations on Google and other search engines.
Usually, web developers use robots.txt to indicate which pages or files in search engines the program can index and which pages should not be indexed.
Besides the group invite link, WhatsApp appears to allow Google to re-index user accounts so that anyone can chat with users or view their profile pictures.
Since the search engine has indexed more than 5000 personal profile links, the WhatsApp user profile can be accessed again via Google.
There are also some links that users use to allow anyone in the messaging app to see their profile picture and status.