Some public conversations between ChatGPT users have accidentally appeared in search results on Google and other search engines. OpenAI admitted that this happened due to a short-term experiment that has now been stopped due to the risk of accidentally revealing private information.
Some public conversations between ChatGPT users have accidentally appeared in search results on Google and other search engines. OpenAI admitted that this happened due to a short-term experiment that has now been stopped due to the risk of accidentally revealing private information.
This is reported by TechCrunch, citing a statement from OpenAI. The fact is that the service has a «share conversation» function, the user clicks a special button, after which he receives a link with the domain chatgpt.com/share. And although ChatGPT does not make these links public by default, some of them have become available for indexing by search robots if, when creating the link, the user allowed it to be visible to search engines.
Conversations in which users asked to rewrite their resumes, made renovation plans, or even had trolling discussions with the bot were publicly available. Some of the data allowed the author to be identified, for example, by mentioning their place of employment or LinkedIn account.
OpenAI explained that «the experiment was intended to test a more convenient way to publicly share useful conversations» and that users had full control over whether such conversations would be available to search engines. But the company ultimately abandoned this approach due to privacy risks.
Google responded that search engines themselves do not decide what becomes available on the Internet, and that control remains with the publisher of the page. As a rule, Google does not show in its results documents or pages that have not been explicitly published on websites.
OpenAI has allowed public links to ChatGPT chats since spring 2024, but the conversations themselves remain private unless the user intentionally shares them. Now, following this incident, the company has disabled search engine indexing for such links.
We previously wrote about how OpenAI CEO Sam Altman warned users that what happens in chats using ChatGPT is not legally privileged information, any more than therapy, medical, or legal advice.
