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Title: Did ChatGPT Conversations Leak... Into Google Search Console Results?

Link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/11/09/0272...

"For months, extremely personal and sensitive ChatGPT conversations have been
leaking into an unexpected destination," reports Ars Technica: the search-
traffic tool for webmasters , Google Search Console. Though it normally shows
the short phrases or keywords typed into Google which led someone to their
site, "starting this September, odd queries, sometimes more than 300
characters long, could also be found" in Google Search Console. And the chats
"appeared to be from unwitting people prompting a chatbot to help solve
relationship or business problems, who likely expected those conversations
would remain private." Jason Packer, owner of analytics consulting firm
Quantable, flagged the issue in a detailed blog post last month, telling Ars
Technica he'd seen 200 odd queries - including "some pretty crazy ones." (Web
optimization consultant Slobodan Mani� helped Packer investigate...) Packer
points out "nobody clicked share" or were given an option to prevent their
chats from being exposed. Packer suspected that these queries were connected
to reporting from The Information in August that cited sources claiming
OpenAI was scraping Google search results to power ChatGPT responses. Sources
claimed that OpenAI was leaning on Google to answer prompts to ChatGPT
seeking information about current events, like news or sports... "Did OpenAI
go so fast that they didn't consider the privacy implications of this, or did
they just not care?" Packer posited in his blog... Clearly some of those
searches relied on Google, Packer's blog said, mistakenly sending to GSC
"whatever" the user says in the prompt box... This means "that OpenAI is
sharing any prompt that requires a Google Search with both Google and whoever
is doing their scraping," Packer alleged. "And then also with whoever's site
shows up in the search results! Yikes." To Packer, it appeared that "ALL
ChatGPT prompts" that used Google Search risked being leaked during the past
two months. OpenAI claimed only a small number of queries were leaked but
declined to provide a more precise estimate. So, it remains unclear how many
of the 700 million people who use ChatGPT each week had prompts routed to
Google Search Console. "Perhaps most troubling to some users - whose
identities are not linked in chats unless their prompts perhaps share
identifying information - there does not seem to be any way to remove the
leaked chats from Google Search Console.."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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