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Concerned about the private group chat links available on Google Search, WhatsApp said on Monday that it asked Google not to index those chats and advised users not to share group chat links on publicly accessible websites. .
Google had indexed invite links to WhatsApp private group chats, meaning anyone can join various private chat groups with a simple search.
Indexed WhatsApp group chat links have now been removed from Google.
Independent cybersecurity researcher Rajshekhar Rajaharia on Sunday shared screenshots with the IANS showing the indexing of WhatsApp group chat invitations on Google.
“As of March 2020, WhatsApp has included the ‘noindex’ tag on all deep linking pages which Google says will exclude them from indexing. We have given our comments to Google for not indexing these threads,” one said. WhatsApp spokesperson at IANS.
“Links that users wish to share privately with people they know and trust should not be posted on a publicly accessible website,” the company spokesperson added.
The issue was first raised in February last year when Jane Wong, an in-app reverse engineer, discovered that Google had around 470,000 results for a simple search on “chat.whatsapp.com,” a part of the URL that makes up invitations to WhatsApp groups.
Journalist Jordan Wildon also discovered that WhatsApp’s “Invite to Group Link” feature allows Google to index groups, making them available on the Internet since the links are shared outside of WhatsApp’s secure private messaging service.
The spokesperson for WhatsApp added that as a reminder, “whenever someone joins a group, everyone in that group gets a notice and the admin can revoke or change the group invite link at any time. “.
Danny Sullivan, head of public search for Google, had tweeted earlier: “Search engines like Google and others list pages on the open web. That’s what’s happening here. It’s no different from whenever a site allows URLs to be posted. We provide tools that allow sites to block content listed in our results. “
–IANS
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(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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