Would you want your chats with AI to show up in a Google search? I wouldn’t!
OpenAI’s ChatGPT raised some eyebrows this week when people realized that certain chats were able to be found by Google search. Although people had checked a box to share the chats publicly, it seemed likely that not everyone understood what they were doing.
On Thursday, OpenAI said that it would stop having shared chats be indexed by Google.
Meanwhile, Meta’s stand-alone MetaAI app also allows users to share their chats — and it will continue to allow Google to index them, meaning that they can show up in a search. I did a bunch of Google searches and found lots of MetaAI conversations in the results.
The Meta AI app, launched this spring, lets people share chats to a “Discover” feed. Google crawlers can “index” that feed and then serve up the results when people use Google search. So, for instance, if you do a site-specific search on Google for “meta.ai” and the keyword “balloons,” you might come up with a chat someone had with the MetaAI bot about where to get the best birthday balloons — if that person tapped the button to allow the chat to be shared.
As Business Insider reported in June, the Meta AI Discover feed had been full of examples of chats that seemed personal in nature — medical questions, specific career advice, relationship matters. Some contained identifying information like phone numbers, email addresses, or full names.
Although all of these people did click to share, based on the personal nature of some of the chats, I could only guess that people might have misunderstood what it meant to share the conversation.
After Business Insider wrote about this a few weeks ago, the Meta AI app made some tweaks to warn users more clearly about how the Discover feed works. Now, when you choose to share a conversation, you get a pop-up with the warning: “Conversations on feed are public so anyone can see them and engage.”
Meta AI / screenshot
The additional warning seems to be working.
Scrolling through the Discover feed, I now see mainly instances of people using it for image creation and far fewer accidental private text conversations (although there seemed to still be at least a few of those).
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Meanwhile, Daniel Roberts, a representative for Meta, confirmed that Meta AI chats that were shared to its Discover feed would continue to be indexed by Google. He reiterated the multi-step process I just described.
For now, Meta AI can only be used via its mobile app, not the web. This might lead people to think that even the Discover feed exists as a sort of walled garden, separate from “the internet” and existing only within the Meta AI app. But posts from the Discover feed (and only those public posts) can be shared as links around the web — and that’s where the Google indexing comes in. If this sounds slightly confusing, it is. That may also be confusing to users.
Now, it’s possible that some people really do want to share their AI chats with the general public, and are happy to have those chats show up on Google searches along with their Instagram or Facebook handles.
But I’m still not sure I’d understand why anyone would want to share their interactions — or why anyone else would want to read them.