Facebook: Another Innovation and Maybe Unforeseen Consequences
March 21, 2020
DarkCyber heard that Google was indexing then not indexing WhatsApp group information. Are other indexing outfits (some we know and love like Bing and others of which few know)?
The purpose of Facebook is for people to share information about themselves publicly or privately. One pull for Facebook is the group chat application WhatsApp that similarly allows users to make groups public or private. If you are a skilled Google searcher, however, some of the private WhatsApp groups are discoverable and joinable says Vice in the article, “Google Is Letting People Find Invites To Some Private WhatsApp Groups.”
To be the best and most competitive search engine, Google crawls the Web and indexes information it finds. Among the information Google is indexing are invite links to WhatsApp group chats. The WhatsApp administrators for those chats probably does not want them publicly shared. There are currently 470,000 results for a Google search of “chat.whatsapp.com.” Most of the private groups are innocuous and/or are for people sharing porn. One link did yield a WhatsApp group for accredited United Nations NGOs and their contact information.
The problem is when WhatsApp users publicly share a private group:
“A WhatsApp spokesperson said in a statement, ‘Group admins in WhatsApp groups are able to invite any WhatsApp user to join that group by sharing a link that they have generated. Like all content that is shared in searchable, public channels, invite links that are posted publicly on the internet can be found by other WhatsApp users. Links that users wish to share privately with people they know and trust should not be posted on a publicly accessible website.’”
DarkCyber thinks there is a fix because Facebook is an interesting company. Governments, including the US government, is nudging forward legislation for backdoors. China and Russia have adopted quite specific tactics to try to make sure that when information is needed, access to those data is available without hurdles, hassles, and techno-bluster.
“Whatsapp Could Soon Get Self-Destructing Messages” may or may not be accurate. The write up articulates an interesting “idea” for Facebook:
Whatsapp has been experimenting with a ‘Delete messages’ feature that allows users to set a self-destructing timer for all of their individual chats and have them removed automatically.
A government cannot request access to data which no longer “exist.”
Some Whatsapp users are likely to greet this “idea” with enthusiasm. Some of that enthusiasm may not influence government officials.
What are some hypothetical unintended consequences of this “idea” set forth in the cited article? Here are three:
- Criminals step up their usage of Whatsapp
- Intercept methods expand
- Controls over what is collected may be relaxed.
Net net: Changes may be upon some sectors.
Stephen E Arnold, March 21, 2020
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