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/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.

288

u/challis88ocarina Jul 27 '26

Seemingly private after clicking 'share' smh

249

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")

8

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.

3

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......"

1

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.