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Google Indexed DeepSeek Chats Shared by Users
Public DeepSeek chat links created with the Share feature appeared in Google Search. Reports say this was indexing of user-shared pages, not a new breach.
Image: ITzine
Some DeepSeek conversations ended up visible through Google Search after users saved them as Shared Conversations. The indexed pages exposed parts of chats, bot replies, and the names of files exchanged in those conversations.
This was not a conventional data leak. The pages had been made public by users through DeepSeek’s Share function, and Google simply indexed the resulting links. According to TASS, DeepSeek says documents attached to those conversations cannot be downloaded, even through page source code. They can be viewed, but not directly exported.
According to RBC, the issue stemmed from indexing of public URLs generated when DeepSeek’s Share option is enabled. Users manually select which parts of a conversation to share, and the service then creates a publicly accessible link. For a search engine, that is just another web page unless it is blocked from indexing or the link has already spread elsewhere online.
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That matters because the discovered pages were not private chats pulled into public view. They were conversations that users had intentionally opened to others. That makes this look more like a privacy settings problem than a server hack.
The episode is also being compared with January 2025, when DeepSeek faced accusations of leaking more than 1 million lines of data, including chat histories and software keys. But that case involved an unencrypted or poorly protected dataset. This one is different: the problem is not a database, but how public links persist and spread.
For its part, MWS AI said it had not recorded any new leaks or hacks. In its view, the surfaced conversations may have been old or voluntarily published from the start. The broader pattern is familiar across chatbots and cloud services: a convenient Share button can also make content more visible in search than users expect.
Security Editor
Sophia unpacks the invisible wars happening on our networks. Covering cybersecurity, privacy legislation, and cryptography, she exposes how our data is weaponized and defended. Before joining for(geeks), she spent years as a penetration tester. She's the reason the rest of the team uses physical security keys.
via ITzine
