Sharing with a person

How a private share works, what a recipient can do, and what revoking does.

What it is

A private share gives one named person access to one thing you made. It is not a public link that happens to be hard to guess: the recipient is on a list, the list is checked every time the item is read, and taking them off the list takes the access away.

Where to find it

Long-press the item you want to share and choose Share from the context menu. That opens the people picker. A separate menu action, Share to Index, is for publishing to everyone — a different thing entirely, covered in Publishing to the Index.

How to use it

Pick the person, confirm, and they get a notification. Received shares arrive in the Shared tab of the Index, where the recipient can preview the item before deciding to install it.

Installing makes them a copy. That copy is their own resource in their own workspace, and it carries a record of where it came from.

To revoke, remove the person from the item's recipient list. Emptying the list entirely takes the item down.

Use cases

Sending one photo to one person without putting it on the internet. Handing a video to a collaborator. Sharing a drawing without publishing it to the catalogue.

What a recipient can and cannot do

Grants are not transitive. Somebody you shared with can view the item, preview it and install it — but they cannot add anyone else to the list, cannot re-share the listing, and cannot turn their access into somebody else's. Managing who is on the list is the publisher's job and only the publisher's job.

The honest limit: once they have installed a copy, that copy is theirs. It survives you revoking access, and — like anything else they own — they are technically able to pass it on. That is a conduct matter under the Terms of Service, not something the platform prevents. There is no DRM here, and we would rather say so than imply a control that does not exist.

Gotchas

Private sharing currently works for media only — images, GIFs, video, audio, music and drawings. Other kinds of resource are refused rather than silently shared, so if the option is unavailable that is why.

An item you have marked secure, or hidden, cannot be shared. Un-hide it first if you meant to.

Revoking removes access to the listing, not to copies already installed. This is stated in the app when you revoke, and it is worth reading before you assume a revoke undoes a share.

A share can be started by the person who created the resource or by an owner of the entity that owns it. Plain members and associates are not enough. Roster management is still non-transitive: a recipient cannot add more recipients just because they can read the item.

Private sharing works at data-contribution Tier 0 — you do not have to opt in to anything to share with a person. You do have to have accepted the current Terms.

One posture point you should hear from us rather than infer: because a private share is implemented on the same publication substrate as a public one, the item's title and description are written to a shared platform index, while the file itself is stored privately and the recipient list is enforced on every read. Nobody who is not on your list can retrieve the item. But the title is not in your workspace alone.

Related pages

Section index