Confidential Information posted in ArcGIS online

[OscarCastaneda1]

Hello folks,
I'm working with ESRI maps for office in Excel, I have a spreadsheet with crime information (date, time, crimetype, location, arrested parties, charges, latitude and longitude) and I'm plotting them on a map. My question is, if all this info is locally kept in my spreadsheet, does it get stored in the ArcGIS online servers for map plotting? or is ArcGIS online only using my lat/lon fields for mapping?. Is there any way we can keep our confidential info here in our organization and send only coordinates? When I'm on the map and I click on any of the dots, I get the popup window with all fields for that specific point; is ArcgGIS online grabbing those fields directly from my spreadsheet or is it making a copy of that information to their server and then displaying those fields in my spreadsheet?
Thank you!
Oscar

[ScottB]

Hi Oscar - great question!

If you are simply mapping XY coordinates that are already in the spreadsheet, nothing is being sent to ArcGIS Online (AGOL). The pop-ups are being created from the local information in the spreadsheet - not anything on AGOL.

However if you don't have XY coordinates - for example, you may only have addresses - the address information will be sent to AGOL for geocoding (the process of converting addresses to XY coordinates). Also, during the Add Excel Data workflow a few records (10, I believe) will be sent to AGOL to determine where your data are located. This is done so the appropriate fields can be displayed in the workflow window. Because confidentiality is required for your use case, you may want to avoid geocoding addresses. You may want to look into Portal for ArcGIS. Portal allows you to perform many of the ArcGIS Online functions on premises, behind your firewall.

If you share any of your maps or layers using the share buttons, a copy of your information will be sent to AGOL. You can limit visibility to users within your organization if you wish, but your information will be stored online.

Hope this helps. If you have any other questions, feel free to ask!
Scott

[OscarCastaneda1]

Awesome!, thank you Scott for your response; it does clarify things over here. We don't do much geocoding as we get the information already with coordinates, however we are currently in the middle of negociating an ELA including portal and for now we are testing with AGOL. We do like the tool and see lots of potential in it.
Thanks again.