January 11, 2021
WhatsApp advises users to not post private group links on publicly accessible website WhatsApp Group chat links were accessible on Google last week as flagged by independent researcher Rajshekhar Rajaharia.
First reported by Gadgets360 an indexing issue led to Google indexing WhatsApp group invite links through which anyone could discover and join a private WhatsApp group by merely searching on Google.
According to Rajaharia, the links surfaced on search engines such as Google as WhatsApp hadn t included the robots.txt file, particularly for chat.whatsapp.com subdomain. Developers use the robot.txt file to inform search engine crawlers on which pages or files they could or couldn’t crawl for indexing to appear on search results.