Presentation Privacy and Security with FlowVella

Presentation privacy and security is something we take very seriously at FlowVella. I’m not sure if you have seen our ‘pledge’ for your data, but we understand the sensitivity of confidential company presentations, and the security for our younger users. Since before, and especially after the revelations exposed by Edward Snowden, there has been an increased sensitivity to consumer and company privacy on the Internet and web based services.

At FlowVella, we always strive to give our users choice with respect to our privacy settings. We recently made some changes to how a couple of our privacy features work, and it seems like a great time to reiterate the different privacy/publishing settings.

When posting a Flow, you will see the following choices under Privacy:

Anyone can see it:

This is fully public and available on the Internet. We can feature this Flow in our catalog (but we’ll almost always ask you first). Google will index this page, and it WILL be searchable by Google and other search engines.

Need a link to see it:

This is not fully public, but if anyone does find the link, they will be able to view the contents. Google will NOT index this page, and it will not appear in search results. We will NOT feature it in our catalog. This could be referred to as ‘security by obscurity’ and is a common practice that our good friends at Google and Dropbox also use to share links. Note: We recently fixed an issue where some of these Flows were searchable, and have confirmed that they have all been removed from Google search results.

Password:

You can add a password to ‘Need a link to see it’ presentations. It will have all the ‘need a link to see it’ privacy with the addition of password protection. This is great for those presentations which you need to know are not going to be viewed by anyone. You can change the password anytime. Update: by popular demand, viewers now do NOT need to have an account with FlowVella to view password-protected Flows. 

Only I can see it:

This is similar to what others may call ‘private’; only the owner of the Flow can see this while they are signed in.

Allow others to duplicate and edit:

If you check this box, other users can can duplicate your Flow and have their own copy. Your copy will NOT be affected at all. Here is a full blog post on collaboration with Duplicate in FlowVella.

In terms of security, all end-user and API connections on FlowVella.com and respective web servers are served over Secure Socket Layer (SSL).

Have any questions or comments? Please let us know in the comments or contact us directly.