On August 1, 2025, the company’s Chief Information Security Officer, Dane Stuckey, announced the removal of the discoverable feature: “We just removed a feature from ChatGPT that allowed users to make their conversations discoverable by search engines, such as Google”. ChatGPT shared conversations are being indexed by major search engines, effectively turning private exchanges into publicly discoverable content accessible to millions of users worldwide. Google: By August 2025, Google had stopped mainly returning results for ChatGPT shared conversations, showing “Your search did not match any documents” for most queries. The issue first came to light through investigative reporting by Fast Company, which revealed that nearly 4,500 ChatGPT conversations were appearing in Google search results. What makes this discovery particularly alarming is that users who clicked ChatGPT’s “Share” button likely expected their conversations to remain within a limited circle of friends, colleagues, or family members. Bing: Microsoft’s search engine showed minimal results, displaying only limited amounts of indexed ChatGPT conversations. Security professionals quickly recognized that indexed ChatGPT conversations could provide “exactly what your audience struggles with” and “questions they’re too embarrassed to ask publicly”. OpenAI characterized the feature as “a short-lived experiment to help people discover useful conversations,” but acknowledged that it “introduced too many opportunities for folks to accidentally share things they didn’t intend to”.
This Cyber News was published on cybersecuritynews.com. Publication date: Fri, 01 Aug 2025 07:50:18 +0000