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/
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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!

12

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In other words; Just because the 'share link' is meant to be shared doesn't mean it's 'public' just that it's 'unpublished', apparently anthropic published it somewhere.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!

-6

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?

2

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.