Privacy is one of the new battles in big messaging apps. Our main wish is that such conversations for a few people can be read by those people, not by anyone else. WhatsApp and Telegram seem to be the enemy in this field, and may be Google.
But it seems that group chats are less private than you think, and that with a simple Google search anyone can access other WhatsApp groups. This is that it sometimes looks boring not as serious as it seems, and it has its meaning.
The links for the WhatsApp and Telegram group are displayed by Google, but there is no reason to worry
A few hours ago the Deputy brought up a security issue by WhatsApp groups. Like many other messaging apps, like Telegrams, they have links to invite groups, so it's enough to send a link generated by the app so that someone can join.
These are links, which in your opinion you should only know about yourself and the users you have referred to They can be accessed by anyone. It looks like this is a Google error, which was pointing all those links to your search engine.
As they point out Jane Manchun and Jordan Wildon on Twitter, just search Google site: https: //chat.whatsapp.com and add keywords to target specific groups among the 470,000 that Google has.
Vice has contacted WhatsApp and Google, and while Google did not respond, WhatsApp has released a clear official statement:
«Group administrators at WhatsApp can ask any WhatsApp user to join the group by sharing the link they have created. As with all content shared on social channels, WhatsApp invitation links published on the Internet can be accessed by other WhatsApp users. Links that users want to share privately with users they know and trust should not be published on a web-accessible site ».
What does this mean? that these more than 470,000 groups have been published by one of the members of the public Internet access pages. If no one shares the link to invite your group, it should not appear on the list.
In the case of Telegal it would be far worse
Do you think this issue only affects WhatsApp and we are a good excuse to go to Telegram? Then apply the brakes, because with the Telegram groups the same thing happens. And actually, in this case it's worse, because here we can directly specify and find the individual users.
Doing a search on site: https: //t.me/ We found 4,420,000 users and Telegram groups. To search for specific groups we can customize the application site: https: //t.me/joinchat. In the original example we were able to find our The Free Android team on the Telegraph.
Is it really a security issue?
It's hard to explain. In the first place, neither the Telegraph nor WhatsApp is responsible for making these links available via the Internet, and this is for the simple reason as the purpose of creating links is to enable any user to join any group. When a user shares their link publicly Usually this is available online.
For example, if we find a group through Google that we know that no one has shared a link to, here if there may be a privacy issue. Of course not, and it turns out that in the tests we performed we couldn't find the independent links, the same way we were able to find the links we published on the public Internet for the purpose.
Can WhatsApp and Telegram do something? Well, not at the technical level, but at the awareness level yes. A word of caution when creating these over-emphasized notifications by creating groups at risk of leaving links on the public web.
