OpenAI recently vowed to fight a court order demanding that it preserve all deleted ChatGPT conversations indefinitely. It was a move that alarmed users who were concerned that their ChatGPT therapy sessions, among other things, could potentially leak online.
The company called it a matter of principle, a way to preserve user trust. However, a significant amount of that information still managed to leak out, as OpenAI inadvertently made thousands of users’ chats visible to Google search.
Reported by Fast Company, private ChatGPT conversations containing sensitive personal info like details about sex lives, drug use, family issues, and mental health, were turning up in search results. The chats didn’t include names or logins, but they often contained enough detail to guess who was talking.
Not a great look for a company in the middle of a legal fight over chat permanence.
OpenAI pulls the ChatGPT feature that let users chatS appear in Google Search resultS
The exposure stemmed from a “Share” feature that let users copy a chat link and, optionally, make it “discoverable.” The checkbox was followed by a whisper of a warning, written in faint, tiny text, noting that the chat might appear in search engines. Stuff like that cannot be mentioned in the small text at the bottom of a car commercial. You’ve got to put that in big bold letters on a billboard alongside the highway.
Initially, OpenAI insisted that the labeling was “sufficiently clear.” But even their Chief Information Security Officer, Dane Stuckey, admitted the feature made it too easy for people to overshare by accident.
OpenAI finally yanked the feature and began scrubbing indexed chats from Google. But they were also quick to point out that Google didn’t index the chats on its own. OpenAI’s system initially made the pages public. In other words, this is entirely the responsibility of OpenAI.
So now, OpenAI’s left playing cleanup on two fronts: legally defending its right not to keep chats, while also trying to erase evidence that it let sensitive ones leak into the wild. It’s a bad look for a company that claims the privacy of its users is, as Stuckey put it, “paramount.”
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