Seems a bit upside down. Should they not approach Google for comment? If a stolen watch turns up at a carbooth sale, I'd in the first place want answers from the seller, not the victim.
dragonwriter · 2d ago
> Seems a bit upside down. Should they not approach Google for comment? If a stolen watch turns up at a carbooth sale, I'd in the first place want answers from the seller, not the victim.
Search results indexed from the public web aren't stolen.
Private material exposed on the public web in contravention of the privacy expectation between the user to whom it belongs and the site owner with custody is a problem of the site owner exposing it, not the search engine indexing it.
PeterStuer · 2d ago
So you are saying the Grok users publicized them (e.g. shared to anyone with the public link, then mailed the link via gmail)? How else would they be on the public web? Or did Google exfiltrated them somehow from a private source?
I'd be surprised x.ai freely aided a direct rival.
dragonwriter · 1d ago
> So you are saying the Grok users publicized them (e.g. shared to anyone with the public link, then mailed the link via gmail)?
No, I explicitly said that the problem was the site owner (X/xAI) exposing private data to the public web, not an end user issue.
> How else would they be on the public web?
The most obvious way data users expect to be private that is in the custody of xAI and/or X (not really sure on exactly the division of responsibility between those two when it comes to Grok chats) would be available on the public web is one of those two companies fucking up and making it available publicly rather than restricting accesss. It something there are rrgular news items about firms with custody of data that should be peivate doing, and it is explicitly what I said upthread. Not sure where you got your elaborate Rube Goldberg scenario involving everyone other than the site owner with custody of the data.
> I'd be surprised x.ai freely aided a direct rival.
Yeah, direct aid to Google would be a lot weirder than them just fucking up privacy, which indirectly gets it on Google because Google crawls the public web.
Anyone with that link will be able to get that chat.
It does not mean users pasted them on HN or some other public website. People often are not aware services they use crawl their data. Links in your personal hosted mail, or IMs will most often end up in the associated provider's search index. They are publicly accesible links after all.
Additionally, grok.com's robots.txt explicitly disallows crawlers from accessing these specific chat links as they are under grok.com/chat/, but it allows explicitly published chats by the user as those are made available under grok.com/share/
Now I know many users of these mail and chat services are not aware that when they mail or chat a link, even just with themselves, they are giving that link to the search crawler/indexer. There lies IMHO the root of the problem.
What is your take? Should grok, as well as all the other ai chat providers, remove the 'share this chat publicly' functionality? Should providers such as Google, Meta and Microsoft not index links from mails and chats?
Personally, I think the latter makes more sense.
mdhb · 1d ago
X made them indexable to search engines. This is their security fuck up not Google’s
PeterStuer · 1d ago
They only allow idexing of explicitly publicly shared chats under grok.com/share/.
Even if you somehow got an unpublished chat link, their robots.txt disallows crawling it.
optionalsquid · 1d ago
If I am not mistaken (which is very possible), then until at least July 1st grok was only disallowing crawling of "/rest":
Seems a bit upside down. Should they not approach Google for comment? If a stolen watch turns up at a carbooth sale, I'd in the first place want answers from the seller, not the victim.
Search results indexed from the public web aren't stolen.
Private material exposed on the public web in contravention of the privacy expectation between the user to whom it belongs and the site owner with custody is a problem of the site owner exposing it, not the search engine indexing it.
I'd be surprised x.ai freely aided a direct rival.
No, I explicitly said that the problem was the site owner (X/xAI) exposing private data to the public web, not an end user issue.
> How else would they be on the public web?
The most obvious way data users expect to be private that is in the custody of xAI and/or X (not really sure on exactly the division of responsibility between those two when it comes to Grok chats) would be available on the public web is one of those two companies fucking up and making it available publicly rather than restricting accesss. It something there are rrgular news items about firms with custody of data that should be peivate doing, and it is explicitly what I said upthread. Not sure where you got your elaborate Rube Goldberg scenario involving everyone other than the site owner with custody of the data.
> I'd be surprised x.ai freely aided a direct rival.
Yeah, direct aid to Google would be a lot weirder than them just fucking up privacy, which indirectly gets it on Google because Google crawls the public web.
Anyone with that link will be able to get that chat.
It does not mean users pasted them on HN or some other public website. People often are not aware services they use crawl their data. Links in your personal hosted mail, or IMs will most often end up in the associated provider's search index. They are publicly accesible links after all.
Additionally, grok.com's robots.txt explicitly disallows crawlers from accessing these specific chat links as they are under grok.com/chat/, but it allows explicitly published chats by the user as those are made available under grok.com/share/
Now I know many users of these mail and chat services are not aware that when they mail or chat a link, even just with themselves, they are giving that link to the search crawler/indexer. There lies IMHO the root of the problem.
What is your take? Should grok, as well as all the other ai chat providers, remove the 'share this chat publicly' functionality? Should providers such as Google, Meta and Microsoft not index links from mails and chats?
Personally, I think the latter makes more sense.
Even if you somehow got an unpublished chat link, their robots.txt disallows crawling it.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250701004836/https://grok.com/...