OpenAI has removed a setting in ChatGPT that allowed shared chats to appear in search engine results. The move comes after reports said that thousands of user chats, including those about mental health and relationships, were showing up in search results even though users might not have realized they had made them public.

According to Fast Company, about 4,500 shared ChatGPT chats had already appeared in Google search results, with some containing highly personal content. Although none of these results publicly identified the users behind them, the scale of exposure raised serious privacy questions.

The feature wasn’t automatic but part of ChatGPT’s "Share" option. When users chose to share a chat, a small checkbox appeared below the prompt with the option to “make this chat discoverable.” If they clicked it, the conversation could be indexed by search engines. Underneath that checkbox was a subtle line of text: “Allows it to be shown in web searches.” While it was opt-in, it wasn’t always clear to users what ticking that box meant in practice.

OpenAI calls it a “short-lived experiment”

In a statement on X, OpenAI said it was disabling the feature. “We just removed a feature from @ChatGPTapp that allowed users to make their conversations discoverable by search engines such as Google.” According to Dan Stuckey, OpenAI’s Chief Information Security Officer, the indexing feature was “enabled recently as an experiment” created to assist users in discovering helpful conversations.

He explained that the decision to remove it is due to the risk that users might unintentionally make sensitive information public. “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,” Stuckey said.

Stuckey added that the company is rolling out the change to all users and is actively working to remove existing indexed links from major search engines including Bing and DuckDuckGo. The company says it’s prioritizing user privacy going forward. “Security and privacy are paramount for us, and we’ll keep working to maximally reflect that in our products and features,” the company posted.

OpenAI is currently required to retain all user chats due to a lawsuit filed by The New York Times. Even if users delete a conversation, OpenAI keeps a record of it unless they’re using ChatGPT Enterprise or the educational version.

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