{"id":161511,"date":"2026-08-26T01:43:00","date_gmt":"2026-08-26T09:43:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/2026\/08\/26\/the-ai-leak-that-wasnt-an-ai-problem-the-risk-of-shared-links\/"},"modified":"2026-08-26T01:43:00","modified_gmt":"2026-08-26T09:43:00","slug":"the-ai-leak-that-wasnt-an-ai-problem-the-risk-of-shared-links","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/2026\/08\/26\/the-ai-leak-that-wasnt-an-ai-problem-the-risk-of-shared-links\/","title":{"rendered":"The AI Leak That Wasn\u2019t an AI Problem: The Risk of Shared Links"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ernie Svenson: Share links don’t expire on their own. Unless somebody turned it off, every link you’ve created is still live, and still openable by anyone who has it. Here’s how to find out how bad it is.
\nThe post The AI Leak That Wasn\u2019t an AI Problem: The Risk of Shared Links appeared first on Articles, Tips and Tech for Law Firms and Lawyers.<\/p>\n

In \u201cThe 80\/20 Principle,\u201d<\/a> Ernie Svenson demystifies technology and introduces tools that improve your workday. This edition: A reminder that secure file sharing for lawyers includes checking all those share links that never expired.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

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In August of last year, Forbes reported that Google had indexed more than 370,000 conversations with Grok. Around the same time, Fast Company found thousands of shared ChatGPT conversations sitting in search results \u2014 names, resumes, confidential work material.<\/p>\n

No model leaked anything. Nobody was hacked.<\/p>\n

Both Exposures Came From the Share Link<\/h2>\n

OpenAI had a checkbox that made a shared chat discoverable by search engines, and enough people clicked it without understanding what it did that OpenAI removed the feature. Grok\u2019s share links were published to the web and left open to search engines, apparently without users realizing it.<\/p>\n

The AI part worked fine. The sharing is what failed.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s worth a minute of your attention, because the same mechanism is already running in your practice, and it\u2019s much older than any chatbot.<\/p>\n

Go Look at Your Cloud Storage<\/h2>\n

Open your cloud storage on the web, not the app on your desktop.<\/p>\n

Fair warning: Neither Dropbox nor Google makes this easy for one person to check their own account. Dropbox\u2019s help documentation doesn\u2019t describe any way for an individual user to pull up a list of every link they\u2019ve created. Google\u2019s documentation covers finding files shared with you, not a list of what you\u2019ve shared out. Worth checking for yourself, because both companies change their interfaces constantly.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re on a Dropbox team, your admin has more to work with: The admin console has an external sharing view that shows files, folders and links shared outside your team. Google Workspace admins have their own reporting.<\/p>\n

For everybody else, it\u2019s folder by folder. Which sounds worse than it is, because you don\u2019t need to check all of them.<\/p>\n

Start with matters you\u2019ve closed. Open each folder\u2019s sharing settings and look for two things: links set so anyone with the link can open them, and people who still have access.<\/p>\n

Ten folders will tell you what you need to know.<\/p>\n

What Turns Up<\/h2>\n