In February of this year, Google and WhatsApp brought together many headlines while some public groups, along with chats and member information, began appearing in Google search results. Although the problem was later resolved and the groups were hidden, some WhatsApp groups and profiles have reappeared, according to cybersecurity researcher Rajshekhar Rajaharia (via Gadgets 360).
This time the phone numbers and profile pictures of the users also appear, which makes the situation worse than before. All people need is the group URL and can join by simply searching for it on Google.
It has been mentioned that users with the links can join the groups and can see the participants along with their phone numbers and the posts they have shared. Not sure when exactly WhatsApp has started indexing group chat invitations to Google. However, the report adds that there were already around 1,500 group invitation links to search results.
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While some of the groups indexed by Google drive users to porn content, others are specific to some user interests.
Rajaharia mentioned that Facebook-owned instant messaging did not use the robots.txt file for the chat.whatsapp.com subdomain. Businesses use robots.txt to prevent search crawlers from indexing content.
As for user profiles, Google has begun showing private user accounts along with their images and profile names, the report adds. It is possible to view user profiles by searching for country codes in the WhatsApp domain. It is said that about 5,000 profiles have been made public so far. According to Rajaharia, WhatsApp also does not use the robots.txt file here.
Both WhatsApp and Google have not yet made public statements.