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ChatGPT users shocked to find private therapy sessions exposed in Google searches [1]

['Ellsworth Toohey']

Date: 2025-08-01

Private therapy sessions, drug confessions, and intimate relationship details from ChatGPT users appeared in Google search results due to a controversial sharing feature that OpenAI has now removed.

Ars Technica reports that users who thought they were simply saving their ChatGPT conversations for later discovered their private chats were publicly accessible through Google searches. The privacy breach came to light when Fast Company revealed that thousands of personal conversations were exposed, potentially affecting millions of users.

While the chats didn't include names, they contained enough specific personal information about relationships, mental health struggles, and substance use that individuals could potentially be identified. The issue stemmed from a sharing option that included a checkbox labeled "Make this chat discoverable," with smaller text below explaining the chat could appear in search results. Users often clicked this when trying to save chats or share them on WhatsApp.

"I was shocked that Google was logging these extremely sensitive conversations," said Carissa Veliz, an AI ethicist at the University of Oxford, as quoted in Fast Company. OpenAI's chief information security officer Dane Stuckey acknowledged the feature "introduced too many opportunities for folks to accidentally share things they didn't intend to." The company is now working to remove the indexed content from search engines.

"We launched this as a short-lived experiment to help people discover useful conversations," Stuckey explained on X, confirming OpenAI would remove the feature and work to delete exposed chats from search results.

Previously:

• ChatGPT became such a sycophant even hardcore AI bros noticed

• ChatGPT confidently loses chess match to 1979 Atari game

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[1] Url: https://boingboing.net/2025/08/01/chatgpt-users-shocked-to-find-private-therapy-sessions-exposed-in-google-searches.html

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