How did Facebook cover-up the awkward Whatsapp Leak in Google Search?

I am glad to know many are following this story and my thanks to all for them. It is my responsibility to let you know what’s going on for transparency and how did Facebook cover up the awkward WhatsApp leak?

The Cover-up

As you know the Whatsapp Leak in Google search is fixed but silently. Whatsapp did not admit there was a leak in Google search and as per reputed news sources they had blamed on its users for making the links public.

Well, some of those users had told me they never shared their WhatsApp number on the internet nor made their link public. So I believe Whatsapp is trying to cover up.

Also, I have observed a few biased media sites were trying to make this issue as something not to worry about. Biased media are often sold to the highest buyers and favor them. Biased media do not support privacy.

The Problem

Pages in the wa.me and api.whatsapp.com domain were indexed by Google because there was nothing in the source code to prevent this. Therefore, the plaintext Whatsapp mobile numbers ended up appearing in the search.

wa.me pages did not have the “noindex” tag in the page's HTML code, which blocks indexing by search engines.

Some developers had also confirmed with me that the noindex tag is missing

The technical fix

Whatsapp fixed the issue by asking Google for the removal of all links containing mobile numbers as much as 400000 links containing non-encrypted phone numbers for wa.me and api.whatsapp.com combined. WhatsApp decided to include the noindex tag in the last few hours before the issue was resolved.

It is also independently verified by Brazilian media Tecnoblog