You shouldn’t use “AI” queries or searches for anything personal. You know that, right? Anything powered by a large language model is generally fed right back into it for more training, so it’s even less secure than a regular search. Lots of ChatGPT users got a practical demonstration of this last night, when a huge amount of their queries were found to be searchable via a simple Google prefix.
This is a complicated situation, so let me break it down. ChatGPT has a share feature that lets you easily send info to another user with a link. But apparently the info in these semi-personal discussions with the “AI” chatbot was posted somewhere that Google could crawl and index. And this allowed it to be easily searchable with the very basic Google instruction, “site:chatgpt.com/share.” Even though the queries searchable this way were probably only a tiny fraction of the massive volume of what ChatGPT users actually generated, it still had some, ahem, interesting things to search through.
ChatGPT’s owner OpenAI was, predictably, not thrilled that such a huge volume of searches were going through, potentially including lots of semi-personal information. To be fair, users had to manually make these posts shared in the first place, and the warning “Anyone with the URL will be able to view your shared chat” appeared each time the function was used, and then also had to opt-in to it being shared with search engines. Nonetheless, they shut it down double-quick.
According to a post on Twitter/X from OpenAI’s co-chief information security officer Dane Stuckey, the ability for search engines to index shared posts has been removed. “Ultimately we think this feature introduced too many opportunities for folks to accidentally share things they didn’t intend to, so we’re removing the option,” they said. “We’re also working to remove indexed content from the relevant search engines.”
The brief window when this information was widely circulating caused some intensely personal queries to make their way around the web, including questions and discussions on health, sex, drug use, and other topics. It might be a painful (if thankfully curtailed) lesson in how quickly one’s personal information can get out of your control if they’re less than careful.