Concerns about privacy and data control

I’m currently experimenting with the plotly package distributed for R. However, I’m very concerned that uploads and sharing of plots appears to be pushed hard. For instance, the world_readable parameter to ggplotly is default set to TRUE.

Is it the case that plotly by default uploads every plot?

For me, confidentiality is necessary, and I can’t even allow the plots to be uploaded to a private plotly account. If it’s not clear that I can make sure the plots are local only, I can’t use plotly.

Plotly’s R client works 100% offline by default. Unless you are using the POST command, nothing is being sent to Plotly’s servers. Make sure you upgrade to the latest version of the R client.

Thanks for the reply, jack. Do you happen to have any official documentation that states this?

I assume it’s understandable that it’s a bit disconcerting when plotting information that should be confidential, and seeing that the function your are using to visualize it has a default parameter world_readable=TRUE.

So you can look at the code for the plot.py function here: https://github.com/ropensci/plotly/blob/master/R/plotly.R#L66-L78.
By default it doesn’t ask for world_readable, and will return warnings if you do provide it as a keyword to use plotly_POST instead (which will put your plot up onto your plotly account).