Well, this is potentially alarming to hear, isn’t it. Generally speaking, we all assumed our ChatGPT chat sessions were for our eyes only (and the great LLM in the sky, of course.)
As reported by our pals over at Techradar, though, that is very much not the case. At least, in some cases. You can now, quite easily, go and find chat sessions other ChatGPT users have had through Google Search.
Yikes.
There’s no immediate indication that your ChatGPT session building a workout plan is suddenly going to start topping Google’s rankings. Instead, by entering site:chatgpt.com/share followed by the topic you’re looking for, you can bring up a whole raft of results from OpenAI’s chatbot.
I know I wasn’t aware of this, but equally, I’m also fairly confident none of my ChatGPT chats will be in there, either. Not that there’s anything interesting for people to look at anyway.
That’s because it seems that for this to happen you need to have clicked the share button on a chat. When you do that ChatGPT will generate a URL which anyone you share it with can go to.
What’s also happening, and isn’t clearly communicated, is that once this URL has been generated, Google can scrape it and add it to search results. As I’ve never once done this, I’m fairly confident that nobody can see my terrible attempts to use ChatGPT to learn a bit of PowerShell.
So, don’t share, your stuff won’t hit Google. I even asked ChatGPT itself about this whole situation, and this was the response.
I do think OpenAI needs to be a little more up front and obvious with users of ChatGPT that this is what’s happening, though. When you click the share button, there’s no mention that doing so will allow your content to hit Google.
As such, you need to be especially careful if you are using the share function. I’d always urge caution over sharing personal information with a faceless computer somewhere on the planet anyway. But be aware, anything inside the chat when you click that button can be found by someone through Google.
The upside, if there is one, is that any further content you add to your chat after clicking share will not be available. The URL generation is finite, and unless you click it again, subsequent information won’t go the same way.
So yes, it’s alarming. But it’s also avoidable. Be careful out there, folks.
