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A few days ago it was revealed that thousands of WhatsApp phone numbers appear publicly on Google The truth is that this, a priori, It may seem suspicious but if we go to the quick issue kit we understand that it is not a WhatsApp security error or a data leak problem.
Most of the numbers that have been filtered by Google are numbers that belong to businesses or to numbers that have been registered in the WhatsApp section for companies.What is the reason that all these numbers have been leaked on Google? Well, the truth is that everything responds to Google's indexing of public web pages and also of social networks.
What is that about Google indexing links?
We are going to explain it to you with an example, so that you understand it. If a company publishes its WhatsApp number on its website, publicly (as all do), this number also appears on Google. Businesses publish their WhatsApp numbers so they can use WhatsApp's famous Click to Chat feature that allows users to chat directly with businesses with a simple click somewhere on the web page or a dedicated button.
If you try yourself and search for site:https://api.whatsapp.com/send?phone=(or using the compact wa.me format) in Google, you will find more than 150,000 results. And if you add a +34 you will also find many telephone numbers but only from Spain.
How to prevent your number from appearing on Google?
All numbers published on the Internet, either on public profiles of networks such as Facebook or Instagram, and also on online web pages, are published on Google. The problem is already known by Facebook What they will do is integrate the “Noindex” tag to these links to prevent Google crawlers from crawling these links, and this form will not be published on Google.
We know, according to some reports, that Facebook has already asked Google to remove these results from the search engine so they could soon disappear (at any moment). And if you have the number published, you could delete it or add a "Noindex" label, but we believe that the former will not interest you if you are a business. We have already seen this problem in its day with WhatsApp groups, because the exact same thing happened.These links have also been removed from Google.
Facebook has taken the opportunity to remind users that with a simple click on WhatsApp they can avoid messages from unknown people That these have been filtered numbers in Google is not dangerous, but it is true that it could be a great opportunity for classic cybercriminals to send you more than normal or try to attack you with viruses. In other words, you could be victims of SPAM but not much more than that.
