WhatsApp starts clearing up their public chat invite mess

We reported yesterday that due a misconfiguration by WhatApp numerous invitations to private WhatsApp group chats were available via a simple Google search, leaving users’ privacy at great risk.

It initially appeared that WhatsApp/Facebook was doing nothing about the issue, but it appears they have worked with Google to have the search entries removed, as discovered by Jane Wong.

WhatsApp also fixed the cause for the issue, adding NoIndex to the chat invites, meaning Google will no longer add them to its search results.

The millions of invites are however still available on other search engines, suggesting there is still a lot of work to do.

It's great to see WhatsApp taking steps to fix the oversight. It's only the first steps though, because, as an open web,

the search results are still listed on other search engines like Yandex, Bing and DuckDuckGo pic.twitter.com/hTth6HciEe

— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) February 22, 2020

The biggest take-away for users is not to share their invites on public forums accessible by search engines.

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.