Search engines, including Google, have been found to be indexing invitations to private groups on WhatsApp.
A journalist named Jordan Wildon made this discovery and shared the following information chirping:
“Your WhatsApp groups may not be as secure as you think.
The “Invite to group via link” feature allows groups to be indexed by Google and are generally available on the Internet. With some wildcard search terms you can easily find some … interesting … groups. “
Any link to a WhatsApp group that has been shared outside of a private message can be found on Google. Users can follow the links to join the group.
The fact that the links have been shared publicly is what led Google to index the content in the search results.
Google Danny Sullivan recognized him on Twitter, say:
“Search engines like Google and others list the pages of the open web. That’s what’s going on here. It’s no different than any other case where a site allows URLs to be listed publicly.”
Sullivan also noted that there are tools available to prevent content from being listed in search results.
It seems that someone from WhatsApp has used these tools, since the thousands of links to WhatsApp groups have been removed from Google.
Although these links have been removed from Google, they are still available to be found in search engines such as Bing, DuckDuckGo and others.
Apparently, this problem has been going on for months. It wasn’t until an article was published by Vice that any action was taken.
To be sure, only WhatsApp is responsible for this problem. Search engines will crawl and index what’s publicly available, so it’s not Google’s or other search engines’ fault.