<aside> <img src="/icons/book-closed_blue.svg" alt="/icons/book-closed_blue.svg" width="40px" /> MuckRock’s User Guide gives you everything to make the most out of MuckRock’s suite of tools. If this has helped you, consider donating to support our work!
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It is pretty hard to accidentally publish your private annotations on DocumentCloud, but if you’re wrapping up an investigation and you want to publish all of your documents, while ensuring that your private annotations stay private, DocumentCloud offers a few different ways you can confirm that your private annotations are still private.
When you first add an annotation, you can choose where the note is Private, Public or shared with Collaborators.
By default, every annotation is private, unless you explicitly choose to share it more widely. Your private annotations won’t become public, even if you publish the document. And annotations are private by default, so if you weren’t thinking about access controls when you made your annotations, your annotations are likely private. Unless you explicitly chose the “Public” option on each annotation, your annotations are private.
Public annotations are only as public as the document: they’re visible to anyone who can view the document.
<aside> <img src="/icons/help-alternate_gray.svg" alt="/icons/help-alternate_gray.svg" width="40px" /> Our FAQ page has a whole section on Annotations.
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If you need to audit or edit your annotations, there are a handful of tools in DocumentCloud that make it easy to do.
All DocumentCloud annotations are color coded:
Any document with annotations has a sticky tab on its thumbnail to indicate the visibility of any included annotations:
The first document (”Reframe Executed Contract”) has one note that is visible to Collaborators. The second (”FOIA_Response_Redacted”) has notes that include a mix of Public and Private. You can skim your project and keep an eye out for any yellow tabs if you just want to be sure you didn’t do anything goofy while you were making annotations.
The Note Exporter Add-On will export all the notes in one or more documents to a text file. This is a great tool for proofreading public notes, preserving notes you want a backup of, or reviewing all your annotations in one place. The export includes the visibility status of each annotation, so you can read through it and catch any annotations that shouldn’t be public.
The Change Note Visibility Add-On will set the access level to Private (or Public, or Collaborator) on many documents at once.
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