Protect your Docs.com account

If you’ve ever used http://docs.com it’s a good idea to check what’s saved there and what public access is set.  Login with your Microsoft account (or other login) and check the list of saved documents (click on your name at top right.

Depending on your wishes you can:

• Leave as ‘Public on the web’
• Change to ‘Limited’ then send links to other people.
• Remove the document from docs.com

The visibility status of any document isn’t obvious from the initial view of documents saved in your account.

If the document has Limited visibility there’s an obscure ‘Links’ icon next to the document name.  Publicly visible documents have no indication at all (as shown above).

Click on the ‘three dots’ then the Edit option to see all the document properties.

There are only two Visibility options.  ‘Public on the web’ or ‘Limited’.

To remove a document, look at the bottom of the Edit page.  Make sure you have a copy elsewhere, before you delete!

Changing the visibility won’t immediately remove the document from the results on search engines like Google and Bing.  That takes up to a month, depending on when the search engine rescans the site.

In addition, there are other web caches which may keep a copy of the document ‘forever’.  Just like anything else on the public Internet, once it’s published it’s almost impossible to delete completely.