WhatsApp Was Exposing Users' Phone Numbers in Google Search

WhatsApp claims it fixed an issue that was showing users' phone numbers in Google search results. From a report: The change comes after security researcher Athul Jayaram revealed that phone numbers of WhatsApp users who used the Click to Chat feature were being indexed in search. Click to Chat allows users to create a link with their phone number in plain text. According to Jayaram, because the links don't have a robot.txt file in the server root, they cannot stop Google or other search engine bots from crawling and indexing the links. Jayaram says as many as 300,000 phone numbers may have appeared in Google search results, and they could be found by searching "site:wa.me."

If it's only the number, what's the problem?

[mark-t]

If there's no association to a particular person, then a published list of numbers from whatsapp is not conceptually dissimilar to a list of four digit numbers in connection to bank PINs.

I mean, it's probably less than ideal, but I don't see this being a particularly huge problem unless the number can be associated with a particular person.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

As Jayaram said in his original post, linked to in the engadget article: Some stranger’s personal Whatsapp profile’s were identified and accessed to prove the validity of mobile numbers and show the impact. Most users do use the same profile picture on other social media accounts, the user profiles can be also easily find out.

Anyone who uses the same profile photo across social media sites can be easily matched to their number.

Re:

[antdude]

They can be used for spams. :P

Not quite accurate

[bickerdyke]

This should read: People who decided to create a public WhatsApp-Url containing their phone number (*) had those Urls indexed by Google.

(*) which they have been warned about

Re: Not quite accurate

[Malays2 bowman]

And the internet [rarely] forgets. Once you put your number out there, any database, not just Google can slurp it and do what they please with it.

I don't feel sorry for anybody who is reckless with their personal information.

Re:

[bickerdyke]

It's not reckless. This was a feature for buisinesses or other people who wanted to get out their number to the public to become easily reachable by whatsapp.

They sell them, anyway

[DogDude]

They sell the phone numbers, anyway, so it really shouldn't bother anybody. Heck, when you use "Whatsapp", they sell all of your text info, your emails, your contacts, your locations, and anything else they can scrape off of your phone, along with your phone number to anybody, anyway. Whether you can find it on Google right away or not is really irrelevant.

Re:

[txsable]

Of course Facebook doesn't want them to be indexed by Google! It's not a privacy issue, it's so FB can have an advantage in the marketing data.

Re:

[DogDude]

Good point. I imagine that you're exactly right.

Robots.txt

[pahles]

So if there IS a robots.txt file your site won't get indexed? Are you sure?