Shinyapps security settings

Hi. I'm new in Shiny and created an app for my company which I want to upload to shinyapps.io and share with my colleagues.

However, this app contains internal information of our company and should be only handled by our team members.

If I upload my shiny app to shinyapps.io and share the link among my colleagues will they only have access to this? Is it possible for anyone outside my company to get access to the app without the link?

Thanks!

The most realistic setting: Your colleagues might be share the link with someone outside of your company.

Also in theory someone could try a brute-force guessing of the link. When he knows you programmed something a good starting point would be to start with jcaloca.shinyapps.io/... and test all combinations of words or letters and check if there comes a positive signal (no 404 error message). However this requires a lot of interest and time. Not sure if shinyapps.io has measures to prevent this.

To be on the safe side you can add user authentifications, as an extra layer of security. So the users need to log-on and even if the link is known it requires still the user name and the password.

https://shiny.rstudio.com/gallery/authentication-and-database.html
https://towardsdatascience.com/r-shiny-authentication-incl-demo-app-a599b86c54f7

Thanks for your reply! Really appreciate that.

I guess it brings some security as long as the link of the app stays among few people.

Do you know if by googling key works of the shinyapp it may appear in Google search? Are shiny apps available to the public in that way?

As far as we know: no they are not.
We had some discussions a while ago, some user wished for adding some information (as a robot.txt) so the search engines actually know what's there.
Basically the web-crawler don't stay long enough on the pages to see the content, they only see the "loading please wait".
Again you can be on the safer side, if you don't put too much details on the first page and let the user click ahead to see some description / explanation.
Google knows my page, but I wrote a paper and the link is out and shared in the public, still it says: No information available

Oh! That's amazing. In a nutshell, we can enjoy some privacy in our apps as long as the link is kept in secrecy :slight_smile:

Really appreciate your help Matthias!