Is it possible to share an app publicly but keep certain data private?

mikeyoung6

Hi,

I'm wondering if it's possible to share an app publicly but not have to share all of the data layers publicly? Some of my data layers in my app are freely available to the public on the internet or the layers do not contain any personal information. Some of these layers are flood plains, permitted mining and petroleum sites.

I have some testing data done at private residential homes which I'm trying to add as layers in a heat map format. I'm trying to keep anonymity so individual homes cannot be identified, I've set my extents on the layers accordingly. The issue is I'd have to make my testing data layer shared to the public as well. Anyone with AGOL or Arcmap would be able to use the data layer and identify the individual residences.   

Some options I've looked at are creating tile layers of the heat maps, the quality was a bit poor. I need to experiment with it some more.

I made an attempt at using an Arcdeveloper free account to register the app and use the "app login" but wasn't able to execute it. It looks like some sort of coding is involved and I have no experience in that area.

thanks for the help,

Mike

KellyGerrow

HI Mike,

Using the heat map smart mapping rendering creates a rendering based on the underlying data. In your case, this includes private information. You could turn the pop ups off in your web map which would make it more difficult to find the data, but the data would still be accessible to anyone who understands how to access rest service information.

Tiling the service seems like a good alternative to remove the actual feature data from the dataset. If you are finding that this is resulting in a poor representation of your vector data, please contact support so that we can look into it further.

Another option to remove sensitive data is to create a layer from your data, and share this aggregated layer without the point information with your users. There is an ArcGIS Online tool, calculate density, that can have some similar output to the heatmap rendering, depending on the parameters provided. 

Additionally look into some of the analysis tools in ArcGIS Desktop to see if these can provide you with a dataset that can then be published to ArcGIS Online without publishing identifiable information. Here are some resources:

FAQ: How can a heat map be created in ArcMap? 

Heat map symbology—ArcGIS Pro | ArcGIS Desktop 

How Kernel Density works—Help | ArcGIS Desktop 

Hope this helps,

-Kelly