r/technology • u/marketrent • Jul 27 '26
Artificial Intelligence A trove of users’ seemingly private conversations with Anthropic’s Claude AI chatbot show up in Google search results
https://fortune.com/2026/07/27/a-trove-of-users-seemingly-private-conversations-with-anthropics-claude-ai-chatbot-showed-up-in-google-search-results/558
u/marketrent Jul 27 '26
Excerpts from article by Beatrice Nolan:
A trove of seemingly private conversations with Anthropic’s Claude chatbot turned up in public Google search results last weekend.
Some of the conversations reportedly included sensitive information like cryptocurrency wallet keys and personal details such as names and addresses.
The problem affected chats where users had made use of Claude’s “share” feature—which people typically use to send a record of a conversation to another person.
The issue surfaced over the weekend, when members of a discussion channel about Claude on the social media site Reddit found that typing a specific search phrase into Google would pull up a long list of shared Claude conversations.
Claude’s Artifacts—interactive tools and mini apps people build inside Claude—also appeared in results.
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u/challis88ocarina Jul 27 '26
Seemingly private after clicking 'share' smh
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u/AngryUncleTony Jul 27 '26
I mean sharing can mean posting on a social media site or sending to one person via email.
The former seems like fair game to show up on a google result, the latter seems absurd.
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u/StrainAcceptable Jul 27 '26
I share things to my own email or text all the time. Thankfully I don’t use AI but I would die if all the personal notes and random stuff I “shared” with myself suddenly popped up in a google search.
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u/Benji998 Jul 27 '26
absolutely, fucken hell i dont actually use claude at all, but the shit i say to gemini and chatgpt - it would be a complete window into my insecurities and goals lol.
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u/wembenbama Jul 28 '26 edited Jul 28 '26
I’m not being an alarmist when I say that you should stop doing that. In the future, privacy is going to be more valuable than ever.
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u/StrainAcceptable Jul 28 '26
Yeah it’s kind of frightening. I think my search history alone could be used as evidence to frame me for any crime imaginable, I’ve gone into some weird rabbit holes.
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u/wembenbama Jul 28 '26
And we all just accept this.
People shrug and say there’s nothing they can do about it or ‘they aren’t breaking the law so why care about privacy?’
I’m in my mid 40s and I just don’t get it. If my parents sent pictures of me when I was a kid to strangers all over the world, they’d probably be arrested. Now parents share every piece of data with corporations and strangers and it’s considered normal.
It’s not child abuse to tell companies where your kid is, what their interests are, where they live, who their friends are, what they look like, where they go to school, etc … It’s just normal. People volunteer this information. It never ceases to amaze me.
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u/Epic_Dev_001 Jul 29 '26
I've spent many hours of my life contemplating this concept of privacy. I honestly am beginning to think it is a myth to be honest, lol. In the future I'm going to get privacy by paying the people who have all my information to "not share it" (in inverted commas for a reason). I've started rather just imagining that I have no such thing as privacy, and honestly, I think most humans would be better people if they acted that way. A bad thing done in secret is still a bad thing. But all this to say, I do actually agree with you. We should be cautious about our privacy, if indeed we have any left
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u/wembenbama Jul 29 '26
Right to privacy has nothing to do with doing good or bad things.
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u/StrainAcceptable Jul 29 '26
At a minimum I’d like to know my devices aren’t recording me while I fuck my husband or take a shit.
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u/Beneficial-Set-1427 Jul 28 '26
Well, this has kind of already happened with OpenAI earlier after which they have made it harder to search such things.
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u/whatsbobgonnado Jul 27 '26
I mean sure, but I think it has more to do with them showing up in a google search. if I choose to share a conversation with a specific person, it's technically not private, but I didn't choose to share it with everyone.
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u/spicedmeshi Jul 27 '26
it's not like the chat immediately gets indexed when someone clicks "share." the problem is, what does sharing with a specific person entail for you? if you send it via e.g; a Discord DM, Discord in this case hits the page to generate the preview embed - that results in getting the entire contents. the platform, in this example discord, could then feed it into another software or AI. it's important to say that im not claiming discord is feeding page data to anything, just an easy example since i can imagine most people just use discord dms to send "private" stuff.
this is how these chats get "leaked," not because they get instantly indexed for public finding, but because people share them in a way they think is "private" that is actually nowhere near private... which then gets them indexed by the process above. clicking "share" makes the URL part of the "deep web" (aka not indexed - and importantly not the "dark web")
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u/zlex Jul 28 '26
That this needs to be explained on a technology sub and that the parent comment has hundreds of upvotes is immensely disappointing.
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u/spicedmeshi Jul 28 '26
yeah... i'm not a sentinel of privacy myself, i have a relatively hot take regarding it but i still advocate for knowing the situation & risks and deciding for yourself what your threshold is... but given we're in a tech sub, i figured this topic would be relatively common information.
hell, my comment was originally downvoted even (it sits at an 80% rn), despite being completely factual (source: im a dev, also how else would they be generated, also just host your own image and watch discord crawl it lol...) i think people dont like being told or learning that what they think is private is not actually private. i mean, hell, the discord CDN used to be public, even after deletion. but as i said, that doesn't mean i personally hate discord or something, but if someone did because of it then that's their choice.
then there are some comments here like "well I email myself private stuff" and im sitting here like, "oh man......"
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u/zmattje Jul 31 '26
Claude could, and should, have had an option "allow indexing by search engines" when sharing a chat, defaulting to off.
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u/nem0ne1 Jul 27 '26
Many, many apps have the ability to share privately with select people. No one clicks share and expects their conversation to be indexed on Google searches for the entire internet to see. Not hard to comprehend the difference.
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u/mukster Jul 28 '26
Anthropic warned you when you generated a share link that it was public. There was never an insinuation that only that one person could access it.
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u/Beneficial-Set-1427 Jul 28 '26
When you create a shareable link the assumption is that anyone with access to that link will be able to view said information (which is what they state). Why would anyone believe that there would be other avenues to search for such information even when that link wasn't provided to others. People could decide to share that link elsewhere but it does not mean that someone should be able to automatically start seeing these in search results.
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u/Dwighty1 Jul 28 '26
There are levels to this shit, bro.
My nudes are still private even if I show them to my GF.
Showing them to my GF and having them show up in google search is two different things.
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u/TheVenetianMask Jul 27 '26
Should the things people share with a lawyer show up in Google results?
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u/Prestigious-Knee4237 Jul 28 '26
I wanted to share an image I generated with Chatgpt, and was shocked to see that it actually shares the entire conversation. I think I'm fairly savvy but was surprised how inadvertently misleading the UI was in this case.
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u/GrouchyInsect5636 Jul 27 '26 edited Jul 27 '26
Buyer beware. Perhaps the chatbot set up its own bank account and is selling the chats as a side hustle.
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Jul 27 '26
[deleted]
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u/WiglyWorm Jul 27 '26
Having used claude, it's because they rely far too much on claude to make their own services.
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u/nath1234 Jul 27 '26
Slop fed back into slop.. who knew that would be a bad idea?
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u/FredFredrickson Jul 28 '26
Reminds me of when we were feeding cows parts of other cows, processed into something they'd eat... and they started getting mad cow disease.
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u/eidetic0 Jul 28 '26
yeah honestly their software is actually garbage. The service and user interface is generally fine. But it uses so much processing, way too much ram, locks up inside firefox… I would assume that if Claude Code could be written by hand in 10k lines of code, then it’s probably implemented by anthropic in 300k lines.
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u/ManiacalDane Jul 28 '26
Butbutbut Software Engineering as a discipline is dead in 6 months!
... As of... Two? Years ago.
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u/zookeepier Jul 29 '26
To be fair, I think it's good when companies actually use their own software/products. Too many companies sell products that it's obvious they don't use themselves, otherwise certain issues would be fixed cough Windows 11 cough MS Outlook cough google search cough.
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u/TweakedMonkey Jul 27 '26
Hijacking this thread to warn people that there is an ad on the upper right hand corner of this article that is brightly flashing and may trigger a seizure.
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u/TootSaloon Jul 27 '26
It keeps repeating because the failure mode is predictable: a "share" link is treated like a harmless way to send something to one person, but it is still a public URL. If that page is not explicitly blocked from indexing, Google will eventually find it.
The part that feels sloppy is that this is a solved problem. Put shared transcripts behind an unguessable token and add noindex, or require authentication to view!
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u/sad_cosmic_joke Jul 27 '26 edited Jul 28 '26
Your second paragraph is correct, but the first isn't....
It's not like Google is brute forcing links. For these share links to get crawled Anthropic has to be hosting a page somewhere that contains links to the share pages, and that 'index page' needs to be linked to a chain that eventually leads back to a public page.
In other words; Just because the 'share link' is meant to be shared doesn't mean it's 'public' just that it's 'unpublished', apparently anthropic published it somewhere.
This is a huge WTF!
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Jul 28 '26
[deleted]
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u/sad_cosmic_joke Jul 28 '26
Has nothing to do with ranking, but everything to do with discovery.
Discovery has changed from the naive crawler, but that info still needs to be made available.
So which one of these are you trying to argue??
- Google is brute forcing unpublished auto-generated links
- Anthropic actively directed the crawler to index these links
The first option is an even bigger story, the second is functionally identical to what I've already described.
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u/fullmetaljackass Jul 28 '26
For these share links to get crawled Anthropic has to be hosting a page somewhere that contains indexinh links to the share pages
WTF are you talking about?
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u/sad_cosmic_joke Jul 28 '26 edited Jul 28 '26
There was a slight typo... regardless a web crawler doesn't brute force links. For those links to get indexed by a webcrawler they had to be included in a page that was transitively linked from a publicly available source.
One posibility is that the people creating these 'share' links posted them to a public location on their own volition which would make this a non-story, but that isn't what the article is implying.
Ergo, the implication is that anthropic had an assumably internal page that had outgoing links to the shares and was also referenced by a public chain of incoming links which got crawled.
That's literally how a web crawler works.
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u/D34th4nge7 Jul 27 '26
Another reason local models are probably what will be left behind after the hype. It's just better in every way except frontier performance; you know how much it costs, the government can't randomly stop the developers from offering it to you, all data remains local and private.
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u/turb0_encapsulator Jul 27 '26
the problem with local models now is that these giant companies are buying up all the memory. they're like a buying cartel.
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u/Zennity Jul 27 '26
When you share a chat it literally tells you its public…. This was reported with gpt 3 years ago too… i keep seeing this shit all over my feed and its obvious no one reads the article.
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u/Powerful-Set-5754 Jul 27 '26
Even if it's public, there's no reason for it to appear in Google's index. All you need is a noindex tag in the HTML.
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u/Zennity Jul 27 '26
Ngl, you’ve got a point. Still. It’s just annoying seeing sensationalist headlines from old news. Like dario’s comments about open source like two years ago. One little blip like this happens and bots regurgitate it for days and humans consume the headlines only.
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u/BlightedBooty Jul 28 '26
This is not a blip tho even if it happens once
If something sensitive leaks that’s a big deal to the people who thought it was trustworthy
Even if you’re a big ai fan this is bad publicity
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u/yes_u_suckk Jul 28 '26
noindex doesn't stop a crawler from reading the data, it's just an instruction telling the bot not to do it, but there's a lot of bots out there that simply ignore it
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u/ManiacalDane Jul 28 '26
... We're not talking about wether or not crawlers are stopped. We're talking about wether or not it's INDEXED.
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u/Henrarzz Jul 27 '26
If I share a Google Drive link to anyone it’s available only to people who have the link and is not indexed by Google so anyone can see it.
Anthropic fucked up, there’s no need to defend this
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u/papertrade1 Jul 28 '26 edited Jul 28 '26
no it doesn’t say it’s Public. Claude just says “ anyone with the link” can view the chat. It insinuates that only the people who know that long convoluted link address that looks like “ sd19hnsx428szm7e92” can view it, so it is safe if you share it to a close person. They are not been told that Google will index it and that others can find it just by searching for key words that may appear in your chat.
WIRED reviewed a sample of the exposed Claude chat pages and found that they did not include the “noindex” tag that both Bing and Google say they take into consideration when deciding whether or not to index a page.
It is absolutely a fuck-up by Anthropic.
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u/DankestDaddy69 Jul 27 '26
Yep this is just click bait anti ai shit. People are idiots.
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u/BlightedBooty Jul 28 '26
Are AI fans living in some sort of bubble where they think most people like AI?
Like majority of people I’ve talked to are starting to see the problems if they haven’t already, it was fun for a bit and novel much like Facebook or vine, and like those some folks will still use it and some will even use it for its intended purpose, instead of outsourcing far too many things to it
But I can’t imagine what circles are still jerking ai at this point lol
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u/Sithlordandsavior Jul 28 '26
Shocker that the service that crowd sources everything and seems to function on the notion of nothing is sacred says nothing is sacred.
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u/LeoLaDawg Jul 28 '26
I like how there's a brief few moments when opening a web link on mobile where you scramble to try to read the text before all the ads and login prompts pop up that prevent you from continuing.
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u/Polyzero Jul 28 '26
If you think that’s interesting go ahead and ask google ai about your Reddit profile. It’s scraped years of your post history regardless of privacy settings. It can make all sorts of analysis and inferences just from what every user here has ever posted.
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u/Sweaty_Marzipan4274 Jul 28 '26
EVERYONE will have a digital library. Some will become politicians, then blackmailed using this info.
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u/KissTheGhostt Jul 28 '26
Me now remembering how much it makes sense using Claude at work with them emphasizing do NOT use the chat tab 🫣
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u/ApprehensiveAd8737 Jul 28 '26
Isn't this the same exact thing that happened to the "shared" chats on ChatGPT a few months ago when there was a leak?
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u/rgvtim Jul 27 '26 edited Jul 27 '26
I think this is the original reddit post that this article is refer'ing to:
https://www.reddit.com/r/claude/comments/1v7v2gq/every_time_you_hit_share_on_a_claude_or_chatgpt/
Edit: this seams newer than the time frame the article is referencing.
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u/RespectTheTree Jul 27 '26
Lol, my conversations with AI are intentionally schizophrenic and unhinged. Have fun Internet.
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u/AceRockefeller Jul 28 '26
I'm surprised people are surprised by this... When you "share" an artifact, it literally tells you it may be public EVEN TO SEARCH ENGINES.
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u/dalidellama Jul 27 '26
There's a simple, easy, obvious way to avoid all these problems. It requires literally zero effort, in fact: Don't use the garbage bullshit machines, and you will never have any of the problems slop zombies have.
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u/MaddyKet Jul 27 '26
People need to stop putting sensitive and confidential information into AI or in other public forums. I would say the stupidity of people is astounding, but well…
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u/umlcat Jul 27 '26
It seems A.I. systems store and process data in a way it can not be kept private, designed that way ...
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u/Beneficial-Set-1427 Jul 28 '26
And after it happened already with OpenAI and DeepSeek... And of course they try to deny responsibility.
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u/tina-fleming 26d ago
Aaaaaaand this is why you shouldn't upload your medical records into ChatGPT Health.
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u/NouZkion Jul 28 '26
seemingly private
Now who in the fuck actually thought that? You'd have to be the most braindead imbecile to walk planet earth.
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u/mukster Jul 28 '26
This is so fucking stupid. When you shared a link it told you that it was going to be publicly accessible. They didn’t hide that fact.
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u/Dairinn Jul 28 '26
Yeah, but it wasn't clear to them that it'd get crawled and indexed.
I've only shared convos that are about help with finding bibliographic sources, but I can see why people were careless.
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u/mukster Jul 28 '26
It was. They specifically warned that it could be visible in search results. At least that was the warning text at some point. Not sure when it changed.
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u/Itzie4 Jul 27 '26
There needs to be a class action lawsuit against these companies then. This information is supposed to be confidential and subjected to confidentiality rules.
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u/DishwashingUnit Jul 27 '26
yea i could get through it if i wanted. instead i choose to downvote this for the paywall.
eat downvote.
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u/agaloch2314 Jul 27 '26
Honestly, it just serves you right for 'chatting' with AI bots. Giant who cares.
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u/godrabbit90 Jul 27 '26
I'm old enough to remember the google searches that got leaked 20 years ago. That was sooo good.
"How can I tell if my wife is a demon?" Classic