Securing private reports and dashboards

Private Reports are reports that are accessible to the report owner only (the user who creates the report) regardless of the user role or profile. The same also applies to Private Dashboards.

In Chapter 2, Concepts and Permissions in Reports and Dashboards, we explained that your admin may be able to access your private reports and dashboards. This is possible when the setting for Administrators Can Log in as Any User is enabled--the setting is located under the Login Access Policies setup. You can imagine this similar scenario with your office email, which can be accessed by the email server admin--they should not do this unless it is necessary and this activity is logged.

Users with the permission to create reports or create dashboards will be able to store the reports and dashboards that they create in their private folder. For reports, the folder is called My Personal Custom Reports, and for dashboards, it is called Private Dashboards (in Lightning) and My Personal Dashboards (in Classic). Consider the following screenshot:

To secure your personal reports, which means that no one should able to view, change, or delete the reports, store the report in the My Personal Custom Reports folder. The report will be not accessible by other users, even if they have the URL. The same can be done for dashboards--store them in the Private Dashboards folder for private access. Consider the following screenshot:

But even if it is a private report, the report will still honor data visibility; you will see only that data in the report which only you can see. Similarly, when you create or edit a report, you can add only those objects and fields into the report which you have permission for. Object and field visibility in a report is also controlled by report type, and we will discuss report type in Chapter 5, Understanding Report Types.

In short, to secure your private reports and dashboards, store them in your personal folders, that's all. Since those reports and dashboards will not be accessible to anyone, you will not be able to share them with other users.