In Retraced, we have extensively thought about document privacy and ownership. We tried to keep it as simple as possible, boiling it down to 4 privacy types:
Private, Shared, Public and Shared by
Private
When you add a document to 'Documents' tab, our default option is Private.
This means that your document is not visible to any of the companies on your network. Your company network though can see that you have a document of a certain type in your profile on their account and can request access to it.
For example, if you have uploaded a Code of Conduct to your profile, your supplier (logged in retraced) can see on your profile on 'Documents' tab that you have a Code of Conduct. But they cannot view it - yet.
Shared
Shared documents are still private documents, which are accessible to certain selected companies in your network. However, please note that once you have given permission to your network company to see the document, you cannot revert the shared action.
Check out this guide to learn how to share a document.
Public
Public documents are visible to all companies in your network on the retraced platform.
Shared by
Last, but most important, we have a special type of document.
Shared by documents are documents uploaded by a company for another company. Here the ownership of the document varies: the one uploading the document is the owner, but the real ownership of the document belongs to the company it is uploaded at.
Let us take an example:
You have acquired a Risk Assessment document from one of your suppliers.
You'd like to upload that document to their profile. At the same time, you do not necessarily want that document to be visible to one of the other companies in your network, nor to your supplier's network. Since the document was uploaded by you, you can still see on your supplier's profile, but your supplier has the ownership of this Risk Assessment document and thus, it will appear on their 'Documents' tab.
However, you can also access the document via the network documents tab.
In the view of your supplier, the Risk Assessment document is visible in their 'Documents' and network documents tab and marked as 'Shared by'. Also note that "Shared by" documents can only be archived by the company that holds the ownership. In our example, that would be your supplier.
