Overview

• OpenAI has disabled ChatGPT’s share-to-search feature after media reports revealed it allowed public indexing of otherwise private conversations.
• A researcher scraped almost 100,000 publicly shared chats, and search engines subsequently made them searchable without user awareness.
• Some exposed conversations included detailed personal or business information that could enable user identification.
• OpenAI is working with Google and other search providers to remove already indexed chats, though third-party archives may keep them accessible.
• The incident highlights the difficulty of balancing rapid AI feature experiments with clear user consent and robust privacy safeguards.