Tons of Peoples' Claude Chats and Creations Are Exposed On Google (404media.co) 32
An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Claude is exposing a wealth of users' chats and creations in Google search results, meaning anyone can dig through conversations or other material that people used Claude to make but may not have realized were publicly available for strangers to see. The exposed data includes an AI-powered therapy app that someone appears to have vibe-coded, notes on meetings, and a dashboard someone made apparently to analyze medical billing data. Exposed chats reportedly include private cryptocurrency wallet keys and personal information like peoples' addresses
Like other chatbots, Claude lets people share their conversations with others by creating a publicly accessible link of the chat. People may do this to send the full text of a conversation to their friends or coworkers in a group chat, for example. But they may not realize Google is also surfacing these links in search results, making them available to essentially anyone. [...] Claude users can change their privacy and sharing settings to make their chats no longer publicly accessible.
Like other chatbots, Claude lets people share their conversations with others by creating a publicly accessible link of the chat. People may do this to send the full text of a conversation to their friends or coworkers in a group chat, for example. But they may not realize Google is also surfacing these links in search results, making them available to essentially anyone. [...] Claude users can change their privacy and sharing settings to make their chats no longer publicly accessible.
People don't learn (Score:2)
The word share on the share button means to share the chat. Posting it publicly, search engines will eventually find it.
The same happened with ChatGPT some time ago, so people could have known that. The function is exactly the same as it was with ChatGPT, with very similar warnings about share links being accessible by everyone who has the link.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:People don't learn (Score:4, Insightful)
TFS implies that these conversations are getting indexed even if you keep the link private. That should not be the case. Is that a good security practice? Of course not, but it still shouldn't end up indexed if the link isn't posted somewhere public.
Solution in search of a problem? (Score:2)
Sounds like an insane mis-feature along the path to project death by feeping creaturitis. I'm trying to imagine why such a capability would exist.
Excess imagination on my part, but here's my idea for a solution using this mis-feature (thereby possibly justifying its existence). First some background: I've made a number of attempts to use Claude (and other AIs) for programming tasks. The early attempts were a while back and failed miserably, but a friend provoked me into trying again recently and it went qui
Re: (Score:2)
That's because TFA is 404media. They don't think too long about what may have happened when they can find an anti AI point of view. If they think the links were published somewhere on the Claude page, they should provide a link to the sharelink overview page that Google found. Common sense says, that people shared their share links (big surprise!) and some of them were posted on public pages indexed by Google.
Unfortunately it seems that you can't search for them anymore. What 404media should have done is to
You don't know what you're talking about (Score:2)
Exactly. This is a non-story. The page is readable by anyone if they know the URL. If you post that URL on socials, Google's crawlers are going to find it.
How can you declare this a non-story if you clearly didn't read the fucking story? The issue wasn't due to users having posted the URL on socials, it was due to a simple google dork of site:claude.ai/share [reddit.com]. How tf were users supposed to know that Anthropic let that url path be indexable by google?
Re: (Score:1)
Whoop-tee-doo... your "Clod" conversation is public... even if it's not, the company still has records, so do a few other places.
If you're worried about company secrets getting out or someone getting ahold of proprietary code or whatever, you probably shouldn't be using AI; just keep it locally on your computer.
Re: (Score:2)
Pages are found by Google unless the link is kept secret, or the site sets an opt-out flag in robots.txt or as a meta tag. But did you consider, that many people share chats to have them found? Not every share link is a leaked psychologist talk, many are "Look what I can do using Claude" demonstrations, or just posted for the informative result in the chat neither hiding nor bragging about the chat.
Re: (Score:3)
The problem is that this is too abstract and too complex to understand for regular people. Which makes this a safety-engineering failure and gross negligence. The perpetrators are the people at Claude that decided it was a good idea to do things this way. Yes, people are generally stupid and understand nothing. That does not give you an excuse to let them hurt themselves this easily. You have to _design_ user interfaces where people can harm themselves taking into account that people are stupid and understa
Re: (Score:2)
The UI is pretty clear. Yeah, people don't read. But you can't do more than telling people what will happen when they press the button.
Re: (Score:2)
The UI is pretty clear. Yeah, people don't read. But you can't do more than telling people what will happen when they press the button.
Actually, you can do a lot more. And it is understood how to do that. Safety engineering is a mature discipline, just one that is basically unknown in the IT field. In the case at hand, you have to break the user out of the normal workflow, make it clear this is dangerous, have them confirm they understand that and only then give them the option to do it. Obviously, that means most will NOT do it and your shiny new feature will go unused. But that is the price to pay for safety and security. We really need
Re: (Score:2)
Do other share buttons on the web break the user out of their workflow?
Sharing something using a share button is a common thing and some users share hundreds of posts per day. Why do you think they don't know what sharing means?
Re: (Score:2)
The target market for these things is not exclusively people who know how search engines work or can even understand the warning. People increasingly have exceptionally poor levels of reading comprehension and it's even worse when the subject matter is outside of their expertise. This is well understood and not any sort of surprise to people who have social interactions with other people outside of their it/dev/ wor
Internet rule #1 (Score:1)
If you post it on the internet (via any method, be it chatbot or whatever). Someone somewhere has access to it, and it inevitably leaks!
Why are you still surprised by this?
huh (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Usually the "share to anyone who has the link" options include a hard-to-guess long random-ish string and do not obviously imply "broadcast to search engines for anyone to find". It's certainly not "only this list of logged in users" private, but it's usually not "broadcast to search".
Re: (Score:2)
It looks more like some people leaked their links to search. You don't see the millions of links that were only shared privately in the search results, because Google doesn't know about them.
Re: (Score:1)
It looks more like some people leaked their links to search. You don't see the millions of links that were only shared privately in the search results, because Google doesn't know about them.
Except the url bar and the search bar are conflacted into once so it's pretty easy the pasted link got sent to google instead of just opening it in the browser
poison (Score:1)
There is a fun game here where you can poison the search results. It might be seeing your vibe-coded buttplug app a lot.
Refresh my memory: (Score:2)
how many people in a ton?
Re: (Score:3)
Surprisingly, there's only about a dozen people in a ton.
Unless it involves your mom. Then it's not even half a dozen.
Re:Refresh my memory: (Score:4, Insightful)
Depends
Americans ~10
Chinese ~15
Re: (Score:2)
If I had mod points, I were not afraid to use them for your post.
Re: (Score:3)
how many people in a ton?
Short, long, metric, or freight?
Re: (Score:2)
It depends if you lay them end to end, or stack them one on top of the other.
Why am I not surprised? (Score:3)
Do not tell a machine your secrets. Whether phone, LLM, online storage, does not matter. Keep stuff you want kept private _offline_.
I really do not get why people have this irrational trust in information technology. Do we not have a mountain of evidence by now that this is a very bad idea?
Re: (Score:1)
I actually agree with you... especially with regards to the various AIs (but, also for IT in general).
People should realize that if it was secure enough, they (the Company) wouldn't be issuing dozens more security patches all the time or releasing a new version of the AI model.
Re: (Score:2)
Exactly. And yet we see, for example, Microsoft issuing critical patch after critical patch to AD, Windows and other important things. It is like people are actively looking away from what is happening.