Time to worry as your WhatsApp chat can easily be discovered with a simple Google search
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According to a new report by Vice, anyone who has access to Google can discover and join private WhatsApp group chats with a simple Google search, leaving users’ privacy at great risk. This is possible because of two reasons:
- Google may be indexing some of the invite links, which, in turn, enables anyone to gain access to private WhatsApp group chats without the need for group moderators’ permission.
- According to Androidauthority, this could be a WhatsApp problem as it’s easy for app and website developers to place a line of code that tells Google not to index information. It’s being suspected that WhatsApp may have failed to type the line of code.
Vice reached out to both WhatsApp and Google but neither of the big tech giants gave an official response.
If you want to find out whether or not a particular private group chat is indexed, you’ll have to go to chat.whatsapp.com and provide some information about the chat group. You’ll then be able to get information such as members’ name of that group and their contact number.
That being said, we don’t recommend you performing this activity as it violets users’ privacy. However, if you desperately want to test this, you can create a group and add a couple of your close friends and then apply the trick.
