Your private Google Bard conversations might not be that private

When you chat with Google Bard, you expect some degree of privacy. Obviously Google has access to this information, but it’s safe to assume that what you ask the AI will only be known by yourself and Google, not to everyone else, right?

It turns out that might not be the case. It seems that due to a potential bug, it appears that Google is now indexing the conversations that users have had with Bard in search results. This means that when someone clicks the link, it might end up displaying your information in the process.

Haha 😂 Google started to index share conversation URLs of Bard 😹 don't share any personal info with Bard in conversation, it will get indexed and may be someone will arrive on that conversation from search and see your info 😳

Also Bard's conversation URLs are ranking as… pic.twitter.com/SKGXJD9KEJ

— Gagan Ghotra (@gaganghotra_) September 26, 2023

Keep in mind that Bard does allow users to share chats with other users if they wish, which might be useful if you’re working on a project with others and want to use Bard for research purposes and want to share those findings with your other team members.

Google has since responded by saying that these shared chats were never meant to be indexed by Google Search, and that they are working on blocking them from being indexed for now. Chances are it might not be that huge of a privacy leak since Bard is still essentially a more souped up version of search, but it could still be embarrassing for some users who’d rather not have their conversations with the AI shown to the rest of the world.