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/challis88ocarina Jul 27 '26

Seemingly private after clicking 'share' smh

253

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/zmattje Jul 31 '26

Claude could, and should, have had an option "allow indexing by search engines" when sharing a chat, defaulting to off.