On Google you can get an answer to any questions. You suddenly have a question in your mind and Google may not answer it. Apart from the questions, there is something that Google search is providing. This can prove to be harmful to WhatsApp users. A report says that Google is indexing private links to WhatsApp groups. This allows anyone to join these groups through Google search. However, Google is making modifications to put a stop to this.
According to a report by Motherboard, the incubation links to WhatsApp Group chats are being indexed by Google. However, when we searched on site:chat.whatsapp.com Google while writing the news, we did not receive the incubation link in the result. Motherboard’s team found some groups using Google search result. At the same time, as an NGO recognised by the UN, he had also made a group of people who had access to the phone number and name of all users in the group.
WhatsApp’s reverse engineer Jane Wong has said that Google has 4, 70000 results in the above case. It has inwhite links to WhatsApp groups. A user named Jordan Wilden tweeted on Twitter and also informed about it. He wrote that if you think your WhatsApp group is safe, it is not so.
Your WhatsApp groups may not be as secure as you think they are.
The “Invite to Group via Link” feature allows groups to be indexed by Google and they are generally available across the internet. With some wildcard search terms you can easily find some… interesting… groups. pic.twitter.com/hbDlyN6g3q
— Jordan Wildon (@JordanWildon) February 21, 2020
Google’s public search liaison Danny Sullivan has tweeted that other open web pages, including Google, make a list. Any site allows public listing URLs.
Search engines like Google & others list pages from the open web. That’s what’s happening here. It’s no different than any case where a site allows URLs to be publicly listed. We do offer tools allowing sites to block content being listed in our results: https://t.co/D1YIt228E3
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) February 21, 2020
What do you think about this privacy breach?
Gracia is a senior writer at Get Ignite, where she covers media and advertising and co-hosts the Original Content podcast. Previously, she worked as a tech writer at Adweek, a senior editor at the tech blog VentureBeat, and a local government reporter at the Hollister Free Lance. She attended Stanford University and now lives in Brooklyn.
