Your conversations with Bard are just someone else’s Google results

If I told you that your seemingly private conversations with Google Bard are indexed and appear in Google’s search results, would you still use the AI chatbot? Well, that’s exactly what’s happening. Google assures to try to solve the problem.

Users of X, formerly Twitter, have shared screenshots showing links to conversations with Bard that appear in Google’s search results.

Haha 😂 Google has started indexing the URLs of conversations shared with Bard 😹 don t share personal information with Bard in conversations, they will be indexed and it may happen that someone comes to this conversation from the search and sees your information 😳;

The URLs of Bard’s conversations are also classified as… pic.twitter.com/SKGXJD9KEJ

This seems to be unintentional, as Google only intends to allow users to create a public link to share conversations with other people. Anyone with this link can see the conversation, but Google seems to be indexing them.

We have reproduced the problem by searching for site:bard.google.com/share on Google. Screenshot: Maria Diaz/ZDNET

Here’s how to reproduce the error

“Bard allows users to share chats, if they wish. Nor do we intend to have these shared chats indexed by Google Search. We are currently working to prevent their indexing,” Danny Sullivan, Google Search Liaison Officer, said on X.

At the moment, users can reproduce the error by typing site:bard.google.com/share in the Google search bar and a list of cats with Bard appeared in the search results.

Even if few people would think to type this in the search bar, the possibility and the fact that these chats appear publicly remains. Bard is certainly not as popular as ChatGPT, but imagine how the more than 100 million ChatGPT users would feel knowing that their conversations with the AI chatbot could appear in a Google search, simply because they created a link to share it with someone else.

Not everything should be shared on the internet, after all

This should encourage users to avoid sharing private information with Bard and any other AI chatbots, and to heed the warnings that the developers of these generative AI tools spread.

Google Bard itself advises users not to share personally identifiable information with it if you ask it if your chats with it are private:

“As a rule, your discussions with me are not private. Google may collect and store your chats and use them to improve my performance or for other purposes. Google may also share your discussions with third parties, such as researchers or partners.”

Not everything should be shared on the internet, after all.

We don’t know yet when this problem will be solved, but if you have already created links to Bard’s cats and you are worried that your cats will be indexed in search results, you can check in your settings. Just go to the Google Bard website and click on Settings, then select Your Public Links. This will allow you to view and manage all the public links that you have created.

Source: “ZDNet.com “