This is a complicated situation, so let me break it down. ChatGPT has a share feature that lets you easily send info to another user with a link. But apparently the info in these semi-personal discussions with the "AI" chatbot was posted somewhere that Google could crawl and index. And this allowed it to be easily searchable with the very basic Google instruction, "site:chatgpt.com/share." Even though the queries searchable this way were probably only a tiny fraction of the massive volume of what ChatGPT users actually generated, it still had some, ahem, interesting things to search through.
ChatGPT's owner OpenAI was, predictably, not thrilled that such a huge volume of searches were going through, potentially including lots of semi-personal information. To be fair, users had to manually make these posts shared in the first place, and the warning "Anyone with the URL will be able to view your shared chat" appeared each time the function was used, and then also had to opt-in to it being shared with search engines. Nonetheless, they shut it down double-quick.
According to a post on Twitter/X from OpenAI's co-chief information security officer Dane Stu
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