Private WhatsApp Groups Exposed On Google Search, But It’s A Feature

Private WhatsApp Groups Exposed On Google Search, But It’s A Feature

Google is indexing the invitations to the WhatsApp Group chats, including the links to join private groups as reported by Vice. As a result, the links are available for people all around the globe to join any discoverable group.



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


Multimedia journalist Jordan Wildon tweeted and raised a question over WhatsApp’s security. He said that WhatsApp’s ‘Invite to Group via Link’ feature permits Google to index groups, which then become available all over the internet for everyone to join.


Vice discovered several private groups with the help of specific search queries. The result page consisted of a lot of groups meant for porn sharing. Once anyone joins the group, they have permission to view all the participants and their phone numbers.


Popular reverse engineering enthusiast Jane Manchun Wong said in her tweet that a misconfiguration from WhatsApp is allowing Google to index group invite links. She suggested that there are ways to deindex the invite links from Search.



A misconfiguration by WhatsApp enabled ~470k G ..

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