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by foob 1046 days ago
This is frankly disgusting behavior. There's zero indication on the homepage that your questions and interactions will be published and indexed on Google, and I think it's an obvious expectation that they wouldn't be in the absence of informed consent. It's common to include proprietary code or sensitive business details when engaging with a tool like this, and it's a vantablack level dark pattern to make that information publicly available as an "SEO growth hack" without informing the user.

EDIT: It sounds like this might not be what is happening. @rushingcreek's original reply seemed to confirm it, and was only edited to add more information after I left this comment.
1 comments
rushingcreek 1046 days ago
Nothing will be indexed unless you actively share the link to your conversation on an indexable site (like Twitter), which implies that you wish the link to be public anyway. I assure you that this is not an intentional dark pattern.
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Racing0461 1046 days ago
Chrome and other browsers use autocomplete to get websites to crawl.
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7moritz7 1046 days ago
Are you sure?

https://blogs.perficient.com/2017/03/15/does-google-use-chro...

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iandanforth 1046 days ago
The problem is that you create such links by default. I should not be able to open a link to a specific conversation and view that conversation 1. Unless I'm logged in and I have specific permission to view that item or 2. I have actively created a 'sharable' link.

People can type anything into these boxes, and if it's PII then you're on the hook for GDPR (not to mention the California equivalents) and implicit sharing and security through obscurity are not viewed favorably under those laws.

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rushingcreek 1046 days ago
This is the current standard amongst AI search/answer engines and this is frankly the first complaint that we've heard about this.

That said, I hear you loud and clear and we will introduce more options for data privacy. Please feel free to reach out to me at michael@phind.com to chat further.

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iandanforth 1046 days ago
Neither ChatGPT, Bard, nor Claude behave in this fashion. To which ones are you referring?
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fzzzy 1046 days ago
If you use the ChatGPT "Share" feature and send the link to someone, anyone who has the link can view it. How else did you think it worked? They have no access control ui.
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iandanforth 1046 days ago
That is an explicit share. That link does not exist until you click the share button. With Phind, the URL to the chat is the share link. It's like every google doc having 'People with the link can view' turned on by default. If you create a random string and add it to their URL scheme and happen on a chat, you can view it regardless of if it's been intentionally shared by the creator, you don't even have to be logged into Phind.
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rushingcreek 1046 days ago
Both Perplexity and You.com do this as well.
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TekMol 1046 days ago
This seems to be a misunderstanding.

Which other "AI search/answer engines" are you referring to?

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7moritz7 1046 days ago
Perplexity apparently does this, I just confirmed it. Which sucks because perplexity is a very solid product that also lets you opt out of data collection and has a share button, implying action needs to take place to get it to be public
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