Google Is Letting People Find Invites To Some Private WhatsApp Groups

Google is indexing invite links to WhatsApp group chats whose administrators may want to be private. This means with a simple search, random people can discover and join a wide range of WhatsApp group chats. From a report: "Your WhatsApp groups may not be as secure as you think they are," Jordan Wildon, a multimedia journalist for German outlet Deutsche Welle, tweeted on Friday. Using particular Google searches, people can discover links to the chats, Wildon explained. App reverse-engineer Jane Wong added in a tweet that Google has around 470,000 results for a simple search of "chat.whatsapp.com," part of the URL that makes up invites to WhatsApp groups.

Motherboard used a number of specific Google searches to find invite links to WhatsApp groups. Some of the groups appear to not be overly sensitive or for a particular audience. Many of the links on Google lead to groups for sharing porn. But others appear to be catered to specific groups. Motherboard entered one WhatsApp group chat that described itself as being for NGOs accredited by the United Nations. After joining, Motherboard was able to see a list of all 48 participants and their phone numbers.

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[110010001000]

"An undergraduate’s estimated full-time, two-semester tuition for 2019-2020 is $57,256, according to USC’s cost and financial aid website. Adding fees, housing, meals, books, supplies, transportation and miscellaneous costs boosts the total to $77, 459. For students living with parents or relatives the total estimate is $64,715."

So, if you made $81,000 a year, you will have $4,459 left over after you paid for your kid to go to USC. Sounds like a good plan. $77,000 a year to go to a schoo

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[Cito]

I am surprised this is only being mentioned now. As this is a trick that's been used for a little while.

I was sitting in IRC and the "Google Dork" was shared, so several had posted their finds and at first lulzy chat logs in the irc channel.

Then we found an antifa group discussing meetups and threatening violence and chats about "what they are bringing and wanting to hit people with". So of course we doxxed and sent their info to authorities.

It began as something lulzy in our irc chat where we mainly manua

How is Google the bad guy here?

[_Upsilon_]

I fail to see how Google is the bad guy here, they're only indexing links found on the web. If anything WhatsApp should have a robots.txt on chat.whatsapp.com to mark the invites as something that shouldn't be indexed.

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[Luthair]

Yea, maybe don't publicly post something you intend to be private.

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[Chris Mattern]

Absolutely. Google has done all that anybody could ask of them by honoring robots.txt files. It's on WhatsApp for not properly configuring their websites. Aside from the fact that they could use robots.txt, why the devil are these "private" pages open to anybody who can type in the URL in the first place?

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[swillden]

Aside from the fact that they could use robots.txt, why the devil are these "private" pages open to anybody who can type in the URL in the first place?

+1. Even if the pages were blocked in robots.txt, that still doesn't make them undiscoverable. You can easily spider a site yourself and completely ignore robots.txt.

Don't publish private info on the web without putting it behind appropriate access control!

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[AmiMoJo]

Because Google is always to blame on Slashdot.