Private Claude Chats Weren’t Private After All and Found on Google

If you've been spilling your deepest secrets or proprietary company code to Anthropic's Claude AI, you might want to sit down.Because you just had a whole lot of those private chats ending up on Google.See, over this last weekend, it was discovered that typing specific search parameters into Google and Bing, it pulled up a ton of indexable, fully readable Claude conversations.We're talking about everything from lawyers asking about reporting misconduct, to developers exposing crypto keys, to unhinged late night conspiracies claiming that Byrds were professional rappers responsible for Jay -Z's music.And while I've got some questions there, the biggest question is obviously, how the hell did this happen?And well, apparently when you generate a share link in Claude, it creates a unique URL.

A report of findings revealed that those pages lacked a basic noindex tag, a piece of code that tells web crawlers to keep it off of search engines.

And so Anthropic essentially blamed those who shared a link and argued that they should have known that it would be public when they posted it somewhere.And in the case of Google, you had their argument being, hey, they're just searching for public information no matter what it is and posting that to their platform.However, they've started scrubbing those links.But also if you've ever hit share on a conversation, that page, still might exist out there.And so if you want to protect yourself, you can go into your cloud settings right now, hit privacy, tap share chats, and then nuke every single link on that list.Especially if, I don't know, your conversations involve anything particularly crazy, like literal crypto wallets or crazy fanfics.