Google is indexing invites to group chats on WhatsApp, making the invite access— including links to private group chats — discoverable and open to anyone wishing to join, Motherboard says.
Journalist Jordan Wildon said on Twitter that he found that the “Invite to Team Connection” functionality of WhatsApp enables Google index communities to be made available publicly when connections are exchanged outside the secure private messaging service of WhatsApp.
The motherboard was able to use specific Google searches to find private groups (and the results included a lot of porn-sharing groups). They had access to all of the participants and their phone numbers once they joined a group— which was intended for UN-accredited NGOs.
Team administrators can invalidate a link to a chat if they wish, but Wildon claims he found that WhatsApp only creates a new link in those situations; it doesn’t automatically delete the original link. WhatsApp community connections come with attached alerts, telling the person who creates the link to only share it with people they trust.
In an email, Facebook/WhatsApp spokeswoman Alison Bonny said that “as other content shared on searchable public channels, many WhatsApp users will find connections that are posted openly on the Internet,” taking a note that “links that customers would like to share individually with others they know and trust will not be posted on a publicly available website.”
Google declined to comment on the record, but the company’s public search representative, Danny Sullivan, tweeted that “search engines like Google & others list open web sites. That is what’s going on here. It is no different from any situation where a platform allows for the public listing of URLs. “He mentioned the guidelines in Google’s assist Center to ban content from being integrated in search results.
Of course, WhatsApp has had its share of problems related to security in recent months. An attempted hack by Saudi Arabia into the phone of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos back in 2018 was allegedly carried out via a message from WhatsApp that had been malware compromised. Last May, a flaw found in the software was used to spreading spyware into phone calls on Android and iOS machines.
