Sharing & Collaboration

What are the privacy implications of sharing and collaborating on Numbers Documents.

You can collaborate with others in real time by sharing a link to your Numbers for iCloud spreadsheet. Shared spreadsheets and any changes to them are saved in iCloud, so everyone working on the spreadsheet sees the changes as they’re made.

As the owner of the spreadsheet, you choose who can:

• Access the spreadsheet: Create a link that anyone can use to open the spreadsheet, or limit access to only specific people who must sign in with their Apple ID before they can open it.

• Edit or only view the spreadsheet: Choose whether to give others permission to make changes to the spreadsheet, or only view it.

• Invite others to collaborate: Choose whether the people you invite can also invite other people to join the spreadsheet.

Read more about this on Apple's site.

Security & Privacy implications of sharing and collaboration

In most cases, when users share content—for example, with shared Numbers documents—and all the users have Advanced Data Protection turned on, Apple servers are used only to establish sharing but don’t have access to the encryption keys for the shared data. The content remains end-to-end encrypted and accessible only on participants’ trusted devices. For each sharing operation, a title and representative thumbnail may be stored by Apple with standard data protection to show a preview to the receiving users.

Selecting the “anyone with a link” option when enabling collaboration will make the content available to Apple servers under standard data protection, as the servers need to be able to provide access to anyone who opens the URL.

iWork collaboration don’t support Advanced Data Protection. When users collaborate on an iWork document, or open an iWork document from a shared folder in iCloud Drive, the encryption keys for the document are securely uploaded to iWork servers in Apple data centers. This is because real-time collaboration in iWork requires server-side mediation to coordinate document changes between participants. Photos added to Shared Albums are stored with standard data protection, as the feature permits albums to be publicly shared on the web.