Tencent has fixed a loophole in its popular messaging and social media app, WeChat.
CEO of WeChat said that a glitch in the app allowed some of the contents to be discoverable on search engines like Google and Bing.
According to the reports of Reuters (a popular multimedia news provider), some part of WeChat’s content was visible on Google and Bing in the last few days. However, it wasn’t visible on China’s search engine: Baidu.
Some articles of WeChat’s public accounts were searchable on the Google and Bing search engines. Previously, it was only been discoverable via Tencent’s search engine Sogou.
Tencent gave a statement in Chinese that after they did the technological upgrades recently, the robots protocol of the official accounts opened up a loophole which eventually caused the external crawlers to scrape part of the official accounts.
However, the loopholes in the robots protocol have been fixed, you won’t see any of the WeChat content on the search engines. Meanwhile, Google Search is banned in China.
The glitch that allowed to find WeChat content on Google and Bing was firstly discovered by a user on developer forums.
Recent Events in China
For a long time, China’s internet sector has been controlled by several tech giants that blocked the rival’s link as well as their search crawlers. This practice, where all the operations are controlled by the ecosystem operator in the closed environment is generally referred to as Walled Garden.
As a part of China’s sweeping regulatory crackdown, the Chinese authorities have been targeting this practice in recent months.
The previous month, China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) asked the companies to stop blocking links as blocking the links was affecting the users’ experience and damaging the consumer rights.
According to Gadgets360, MIIT is working on making WeChat content accessible to external search engines.
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