Forum Discussion
Question about the data security/confidential data / licensing
Using it in the desktop version without a license is as safe as your computer is safe. The data lives on your computer until you publish it, and even when you publish it (which you have to explicitly select the "publish" button and select a workspace to do) it is private until you share or do a secondary "publish to web". The publish to the web is probably the thing you saw that was concerning - it's likely impossible to do this on accident, you have to have published it up to the cloud first and it's buried a couple levels down in the menu.
Greg1997 great questions, let's start with this. When data leaves your premise:
When you publish your report to Power BI service and you are using import mode (most common) then it is in the cloud. Now the question comes, what cloud? Power BI service is maintained by Microsoft in their data centers and you can check in the Power BI service ( app.powerbi.com) in which tenant your data will reside.
Now 2nd question, who can access this data once it is published to the cloud? There is whole security built around who can see your data (report) in your tenant. You can explicitly share it with the users in the organization if you want, you can also share it with external users, but it will be only available to them if you share it.
And another question, what if I want to share the reports with others in my org but don't want to publish them to the service? There are two options: 1) you can share pbix files with your users internally (like sharing Excel files) they will open on the Power BI desktop and view the reports and do whatever they want but this is not a scalable solution because you can have many version of the same report as it can happen with Excel file as well. 2) There is a product called Power BI Report Server - it is similar to Power BI service but it is the on-prem solution. In this case, your data never leaves the premise, you can publish your reports to an internal Power BI server and give access to the users.
I hope this gives you some idea but feel free to reach out if you need further clarification.