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Hundreds of thousands of private conversations with xAI’s Grok chatbot have been made publicly accessible after they became indexed on Google.
As originally reported by Forbes, 370,000 user conversations were indexed on Google, making them searchable and accessible by anyone who searches for them.
The conversations were indexed without the knowledge of users who used the “share” feature, which allowed them to generate a link and privately share conversations with friends and colleagues, a handy feature that could help with resume writing or just sharing funny conversations.
However, the share feature does not advertise conversations being indexed and becoming accessible to the public through search engines like Google and Bing.
Some conversations contained personal data, including names, image files, spreadsheets, text documents and even one password.
Forbes says that conversation content varied greatly, with some discussing “simple business tasks like writing tweets to generating images of a fictional terrorist attack in Kashmir and attempting to hack into a crypto wallet.”
The publication also found that a number of these conversations violated xAI’s terms of use, with some asking the AI with assistance constructing explosives, methods of suicide, instructions for making illicit drugs and requests to code self-executing malware.
xAI says that any use of Grok to “promote critically harming human life” or developing “bioweapons, chemical weapons, or weapons of mass destruction,” is prohibited.
Last month, users of OpenAI’s ChatGPT also found that their conversations were being indexed.
Google said the indexation of these pages is not controlled by them or any other search engine.
“Neither Google nor any other search engine controls what pages are made public on the web. Publishers of these pages have full control over whether they are indexed by search engines,” it said.
Additionally, Google Drive users previously reported sharing data with the “anyone with the link” share option found their documents were being indexed.
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