OpenAI has just announced that it is killing a new feature that made ChatGPT conversations available on Google Search. The feature was rolled out quietly earlier in the year but caused much uproar recently as many private conversations started showing up on Google search results, putting the privacy and safety of users at risk.
OpenAI Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) Dane Stuckey, in a post on X (formerly Twitter), informed users about taking down the feature from the popular chatbot.
“We just removed a feature from @ChatGPTapp that allowed users to make their conversations discoverable by search engines, such as Google. This was a short-lived experiment to help people discover useful conversations. This feature required users to opt in, first by picking a chat to share, then by clicking a checkbox for it to be shared with search engines (see below),” Stuckey wrote.
“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,” he added.
Stuckey also noted that OpenAI is working with search engines to remove the already indexed content from the web.
What is the controversy about?
OpenAI had rolled out an update to ChatGPT that gave users the option to make their chats discoverable on search engines. While the company has clarified that this was an opt-in feature and not enabled by default, it seems that many users inadvertently clicked on this option while sharing their chats with friends or family.
As OpenAI CEO Sam Altman rightly pointed out in a recent podcast, “people talk about the most personal shit in their lives to ChatGPT.” A new report by Fast Company revealed that there were over 4,500 conversations indexed on Google. While many of them did not contain personal data, others did — including identifiable details like names, places and more — that could put users at risk.
Moreover, even if a user deleted the conversation link or deleted the conversation altogether, it would not guarantee that it was no longer indexed by Google. In fact, the conversation would likely remain public until Google updates its index.
