470,000 groups are open to join!
Jordan Wildon, a multimedia journalist of Deutsche Welle, tweeted about WhatsApp group links being openly available in Google. He said,
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 Further, it can allow anyone to join and view contact information of participants in that group. A reverse engineer, Jane Manchun Wong studied this case and said a misconfiguration in WhatsApp is letting Google index links publicly. She even said a remedy for that, by adding Disallow by robots.txt or adding a noindex meta tag. Vice, who reported this first, said a typical search can garner typical groups, and there are over tens of thousands of groups openly available to join, with few of them being overly sensitive for porn sharing.
Responses
Further, Google’s Public Search Liaison responded to this incident by a tweet as, “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.”
