Security News > 2020 > February > Google stops indexing WhatsApp chats; other search engines still at it
A simple Google search could lead people to invite codes that would let them find and join private WhatsApp group chats, given that the pages were indexed by Google.
This is past tense, at least for Google search: as of Saturday, WhatsApp tweaked the glitch out of existence, though the search was still working on other, major search engines as of today.
A misconfiguration by WhatsApp enabled ~470k Group Invite links to be indexed by search engines.
Group admins in WhatsApp groups are able to invite any WhatsApp user to join that group by sharing a link that they have generated.
Whatever happened behind the scenes with this glitch getting semi-fixed, WhatsApp and Facebook don't seem to want to reach out to all the major search engines to get group chat links de-indexed.