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ChatGPT chats accidentally showed up on Google; here’s what really happened
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, had a feature that let users create a link to share their chat with others. Many people used this “share” button to send a conversation to a friend or colleague.
The issue first came to light thanks to a TechCrunch report, which detailed how casual Googling of “chat.openai.com/share” led to a rabbit hole of indexed conversations.
You may have once shared your thoughts with ChatGPT, maybe about a breakup, job decision or just a random question. It felt private, like talking to a smart diary that listens without judging.
But what if someone told you that your chat could have shown up on Google for anyone to read? That’s what recently happened, not because of a data leak, but because of a feature that made sharing a bit too easy.
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, had a feature that let users create a link to share their chat with others. Many people used this “share” button to send a conversation to a friend or colleague. But what they didn’t realize was this, if you didn’t turn off a small setting, those shared chats could be picked up by search engines like Google or Bing.
That means people who searched “chat.openai.com/share” could find hundreds of shared chats including personal stories, job advice, and even funny or embarrassing questions.
A report by TechCrunch found this issue and brought it to light. They showed how easy it was to find shared chats online. Many of these were meant to be private, shared only with close friends but were accidentally made public.
To be clear, OpenAI didn’t make all chats public. Only chats that users manually shared using the special link could be seen on Google. But the problem is, people didn’t realize those links could be found by anyone, not just the person they sent it to.
After the news came out, OpenAI acted quickly. They said this was part of a short “experiment” to test how people use the sharing feature. Once they saw it caused privacy issues, they stopped search engines from showing these links. Now, even if you share a chat, it won’t show up in Google results.
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