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