- Openai has removed the chatgpt feature so people can search through public conversations with a search engine
- Many users learned too late that activating the “discoverable” setting could make chats available for all online
- The decision came after more people saw their sensitive and private information published
Openai has suddenly closed a feature in Chatgpt that allowed chats to publicly shared searchable via Google. Users were uncomfortably surprised to find that private information that was shared with chatgpt was now publicly available as a Google -seeking result.
Dane Stuckey, Openai’s Chief Information Security Officer, announced the shutdown on Thursday with the Disabled feature Friday morning. Openai has also begun to scrub the search engine index for the previously shared conversations.
Openai designed the “Make This Link Invisible” check box that they had clicked on to give more people access to potentially useful conversations between chatgpt and different users. In practice, it opened the door to a new kind of digital exposure, where criminal confessions, personal secrets and business practices were just a few key words away from emerging in a Google search.
This was not some unclear opt-out hidden in a developer console. It was right there in the sharing menu in any chatgpt conversation that users chose to turn into a public link. While Openai thought the wording was aware of what users were doing, many users apparently did not understand. They thought the link would remain private or unkind unless explicitly shared.
For the average person using chatgpt to plan a letter of severance, troubleshooting a relationship or working on a legal strategy, it is more than a technical hiccup. It’s a gut control. If you’ve ever shared a link to a conversation, there’s a non -nul chance that someone found it by a Google search.
Some of the reported indexed conversations included internal job applicant evaluations, sensitive information on mental health, confessions of crime and proprietary software code. People talked to chatgpt as if it were private, but for everyone who changed that attitude, it wasn’t.
We just removed a feature from @chatgptApp that allowed users to make their conversations discoverable of search engines, such as Google. This was a short -term experiment to help people discover useful conversations. This feature required users to sign up, first by choosing a chat … pic.twitter.com/mgi3lf05ua31 July 2025
Searchable secrets
For Openai’s credit, the company drew the function quickly. But the fallout raises important questions not only about privacy, but about how much users can reasonably be expected to understand the tools they use. The “discoverable” check box did not hide behind a wall, but it also did not do a great job of communicating the extent of its consequences. It’s one thing to share a link, but indexing it in global search enclosed time is something else.
It’s fascinating what this says about how users behave with AI. The confidential it, test ideas, ventilation frustrations and draft items they would never enter in a search beam. If you’ve ever shared a chatgpt conversation, it’s worth checking if this link is still live.
While Openai is working with Google and other search engines to clean previously indexed content, searching crawlers has long memories. Some content can dwell for a while even if deleted. Openai disabled the function quickly, but the damage can already happen to some users.
Hopefully the lesson will stick to the public, just as the idea of not erasing embarrassing browser stories has been transferred from a common joke to something that only the most clueless person would forget to do. The magic of tools such as Chatgpt lies in how they create the illusion of a conversation. But if you forget that it is still an illusion, you may not be able to notice risks like buttons that send your digital heart-to-heart directly to Google.
