WhatsApp fixes 'problem' that may have leaked your chats on Google

Earlier today it was widely reported that invite links to private WhatsApp Group chats were ‘available’ on Google. This meant that anyone could’ve joined private chat groups by just searching for groups. A report by Motherboard pointed the issue that WhatsApp Group chats were being indexed by Google. The number of groups that were reportedly indexed by Google were close to 470,000.
A journalist tweeted that WhatApp Groups may not be as secure as people think they are as Google was indexing them. To this comment, Danny Sullivan, Google’s public search liaison tweeted, “Search engines like Google & others list pages from the open web. That’s what’s happening here. It’s no different than any case where a site allows URLs to be publicly listed. We do offer tools allowing sites to block content being listed in our results.”

However, it does seem like WhatsApp may have fixed this ‘problem’. App reverse engineer Jane Wong tweeted later that, Looks like WhatsApp has fixed it by removing the existing listing from Google and adding the `noindex` meta tag on the chat invitation links!

While WhatsApp didn’t officially confirm this, a spokesperson told The Verge, “"Like all content that is shared in searchable public channels, invite links that are posted publicly on the internet can be found by other WhatsApp users.” The spokesperson further said that, “The links that users wish to share privately with people they know and trust should not be posted on a publicly accessible website.”
Interestingly, a Hyderabad-based security researcher claims that he had pointed out the issue to Facebook back in November 2019. He, in fact, got a response from Facebook’s security team also. Facebook’s security team told him that the company “cannot completely control what all search engines, Google and others index.” More so, Facebook also told him that the “links being accessible by anyone was an intentional decision.” Group admins, had the ability to invalidate the links if they wished to do so.