Links to Claude Chats Were Indexed by Google and ‘Bing’, Whatever That Is ⇥ wired.com

Maddy Varner, Wired:

Over the weekend, people were surprised to discover that some Anthropic Claude chats could be easily found via web search. The issue, which appears to have been first flagged by a redditor, exposed chats that included people asking for advice about what political party they should join, whether attorneys in Kansas are required to self-report when they believe they’ve committed an ethical violation, and erotic role play.

Search engines do not automatically discover new URLs as they are created. They are typically indexed by taking one of two actions: either the site owner submits URLs to search engines — by using a site map, for example, or by manually submitting the page for indexing — or by someone linking to the URL from a different already-indexed page. The critical thing left unreported in Varner’s article is whether these Claude links were being indexed thanks to Anthropic’s actions or those of users.

Iain Martin and Emily Baker-White wrote about this issue at Forbes last year, though it seems the problem was not fixed until after Varner’s article was published yesterday:

Anthropic spokesman Gabby Curtis told Forbes that the Claude conversations were only visible on Google and Bing because users had posted links to the conversations online or on social media. “We give people control over sharing their Claude conversations publicly, and in keeping with our privacy principles, we do not share chat directories or sitemaps of shared chats with search engines like Google and actively block them from crawling our site,” Curtis said in an email to Forbes.

However, Forbes spoke with one of the users identifiable from their public Claude prompt who said they had not posted the work-related chatbot conversation online. The user asked not to be identified because of their job.

Anthropic should have always blocked these URLs from being indexed altogether, and it is good they have now done so.

Ben Lovejoy, of 9to5Mac, decided this fiasco was an “endorsement of Apple’s privacy approach”:

Apple has a three-tiered approach to privacy in Apple Intelligence and the new Siri:

The issue affecting Claude chats has nothing to do with Apple’s specific architecture. If Apple provided users with a way to share links to Siri conversations, it would also need to consider whether those URLs are indexed by search engines — like, say, how iCloud Drive links used to be. (Shared photo albums were also indexed if their links were posted publicly.)

There are good reasons to appreciate the promises of local processing and Private Cloud Compute. This is not one of them. I hope some media relations person in Cupertino at least appreciates the effort 9to5Mac puts into blowing smoke up Apple’s ass, despite its irrelevance.