New chapter of my serie #DeleteFacebook, and this time,I am writing about why you should avoid to use WhatsApp web, because it has some security problems. I have not discover anything (I would like to have more advanced knowledge about hacking and security), but it is an extra reason to forget about it: Google are indexing telephone numbers and messages.
WhatsApp and Facebook
As you can imagine, I’m not a very good friend of Facebook and I have published it on this blog in several articles, because I think there is no ethics on the company: they blow your privacy out of the water.
The latest episode has been the update of WhatsApp’s terms of use and all the commotion that has formed, but I see it clearly:
Facebook needs the explicit consent of users to continue doing with impunity everything it does with our privacy. This is how it complies with the law, the famous GDPR..
In this way, Facebook will avoid fines and continue to earn more and more money, now in a more legal way.
Hacking WhatsApp web from search engines
Recently, in a tweet, someone commented that Google (the all-seeing eye) indexes the numbers and messages of users who use the web version of the application, a full-fledged hacking of WhatsApp web:
Indeed, you can put a phone number in the search engine and you get a link to whatsapp web. For the example, the number 5213314119431. Let’s try Google:
Let’s try to do the same search on other engines, such as DuckDuckDuck or Bing, but no result:
Surprise!!!!!!! How can it be?
Well, despite robots.txt and the “disallow all” configuration, Google indexes it. Undoubtedly, one more example that the big G is “the all-seeing eye”, even what it should not!
Clearly, quite an indiscretion on the part of Google, and a bit of negligence and carelessness on the part of Facebook. It is curious (or it may seem so) this slip of both technological giants.
As I read, part of the problem comes indirectly from the use of the WhatsApp API linked to Google Sheets, and is that is YouTube you can find numerous tutorials to combine both technologies, always with marketing at stake. Here is an example:
Things you can read about this hack
The most obvious one is that, even if I make the rules, I skip them when and how I want to. (Google dixit).
The second: the big giants are the most interested in looking after your privacy, obviously, because it benefits them! I don’t want to sound like a rule breaker, but data trafficking is very profitable, especially if you use data analytics!
Undoubtedly, privacy data collection is a black box that no one knows how it works, but that generates significant benefits. it is the era of Big Data, and this is not stopping, it is going to go further..
There is little a user can do, in fact, except to limit the amount of data to be filled in his profile to prevent data leakage.
I hope this example helps you to become aware of the use of WhatsApp, especially in its web version, or if you use it, that you know what you are exposed to!