OpenAI removes ChatGPT self-doxing option
OpenAI has removed the option to make ChatGPT interactions indexable by search engines to prevent users from unwittingly exposing sensitive information.
The feature rollback follows reports of ChatGPT conversations being discoverable in search results, an option recently extended to ChatGPT users.
Dane Stuckey, CISO of OpenAI, announced the change in a social media post. He described it as a short-lived experiment to help people discover useful conversations.
“Ultimately we think this feature introduced too many opportunities for folks to accidentally share things they didn’t intend to, so we’re removing the option,” he said. “We’re also working to remove indexed content from the relevant search engines. This change is rolling out to all users through tomorrow morning.”
Despite explicit warnings “not to share any sensitive content,” ChatGPT users did so anyway, undermining their own privacy. Similar to the search advertising industry, AI vendors argue that models can do more when they have access to our data and applications, at least in the context of chatbots and agents. But giving AI models access to personal info magnifies the privacy and security risks.
The incident recalls how payment service Venmo once made user transactions public by default, until legal action forced a policy change. OpenAI, however, did not expose chats by default – users had to opt-in to expose their conversations.
OpenAI’s option to tell search engines to index a given chat interaction took the form of a checkbox titled “Make this chat discoverable” in the “Share public link to chat” popup window that follows from clicking on the share icon in ChatGPT.
OpenAI has offered ChatGPT Shared Links since at least May 2023 when the company documented the feature. At the time, the company said shared links “are not indexed by search engines.”
Earlier this year, the documentation changed to: “You can choose to share the article through the link or make it available to be indexed by search engines.”
We note that the use of the term “article,” something normally associated with human authorship, is applied to the combination of user prompt and machine response, as if the two were interchangeable.
OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request to clarify when that occurred.
OpenAI’s search scrubbing effort appears to be underway but incomplete. Google Search with the site: operator for chatgpt.com/share no longer returns a list of shared, indexed chats. Bing Search returned thousands of results. DuckDuckGo also returned many. So did Brave Search. We saw personal information in many of these results.
The search result chat purge is limited in scope, however. In June 2025, OpenAI said that it faces a legal demand from a New York Times copyright claim to retain consumer ChatGPT and API customer data indefinitely. The AI biz said it’s fighting that demand because it “fundamentally conflicts with the privacy commitments we have made to our users.” ®
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