WhatsApp Groups Are Not As Safe As You Think!

Anytime you receive a WhatsApp group invite, you accept it wholeheartedly. But, did you know that your security is being compromised to a great extent?

By Gairika Mitra Last updated Feb 24, 2020

In case you are thinking that your WhatsApp Group maintains your privacy, well, it’s reported that WhatsApp groups aren’t really that private. Renowned international journalist Jordan Wildon stated that WhatsApp’s ‘Invite to Group via Link’ feature, often lets groups to be indexed by search engines.

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

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Now, imagine that there a public group, for almost all topics, right from animal rescue to journals. Once you join in, you can see the participants and also their phone numbers. As per a renowned developer Jane Manchun Wong, who once noted that Google gives about 470,000 results for the chat.whatsapp.com URLs, that is being used by group invites.

A misconfiguration by WhatsApp enabled ~470k Group Invite links to be indexed by search engines

It should’ve been `Disallow`ed with robots.txt or with the `noindex` meta tag

thanks @JordanWildon for the tip https://t.co/CJxjJ5qyfh pic.twitter.com/FrW1I9Y8vs

— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) February 21, 2020

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In order to gain clarity, this isn’t a glitch or anything that is new to WhatsApp. Google once said that it would index sites on the open web. This includes group invites, but it also offers tools that allow sites to block content that is being listed in its results.

However, WhatsApp has said that just like all of the content that is being shared in searchable, public channels, invite links, which are posted publicly on the web. This could be found but other WhatsApp users. WhatsApp even said that users wish to share privately with peeople they know and trust personally, and that this should not be posted on a publicly accessible website.

Literally speaking, there is more than one problem. It just takes one member to share a link publicly, and compromise on everyone else’s privacy. Problem is that the other member would not get to know if it happened at all. Probably, you should think twice before posting sensitive information on a WhatsApp group.