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Claude AI users have taken to the internet in panic after some uncovered their shared chats available completely publicly on Google.
While it seems that many people are now sharing more and more personal information with AI chatbots in their day-to-day lives, some may not be aware they are sharing their chats publicly online.
This has since come to light after one eagle-eyed social media user noticed that many private conversations are being set to ‘share’ rather than ‘private’.
In a post on Reddit, one user shared a screenshot of their findings, writing: “You can view a lot of shared conversations via Google. Simple google dork request lets you find a LOT of them. ive already found some college student going insane.”
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This prompted others to share their own thoughts on the matter, with one person saying: “DUDE! this is amazing. I'm gonna share this with my coworker who teaches cyber security.”
Another wrote: “This need to be reported and fixed asap. This should not be possible. I found many conversations including sensitive Informations like SSN. Wtf dude.”
A third user commented: “That’s not some bug or thing to fix. It’s how sharing works and the issue is that most people just don’t understand how sharing works. They need to change it, not fix it. It’s working as intended. They need to either notify people that shared means public or change it altogether.”
And a fourth added: “everyone, fun over. anthropic fixed it.”
It seems that the issue lies with people not realizing that their settings are public, which is a problem that hasn’t been unique to Claude, as the likes of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and xAI’s Grok have also faced similar situations.
If you’re worried that you might fall victim to a similar issue, then it might be wise to check your privacy settings.
This can be done on Claude by heading to Settings, followed by Privacy and then Shared Chats, where you can view which conversations are public and choose to keep them private.
While Anthrophic, the AI firm behind Claude, puts privacy protections into place for users’ data, the company does recommend being ‘thoughtful about sharing highly sensitive personal details’.
This includes the likes of financial information, such SSN, credit card numbers, bank account details, health records or medical information, passwords or private login credentials, and any confidential business or personal documents.
