How secure are Confluence Public Links? Do most organisations have this switched on?

[Siobhan Doyle]

Hi, 

My team and I are really keen to start sharing confluence pages with stakeholders in our organisation, we want to turn on public links for some pages/spaces to reduce the amount of time we are spending copying information into other tools and exporting into PDF. We are really struggling to convince our Confluence administrator that this is a secure and safe way to share information (our org is older than 2023 so it's switched off by default). 

I've shared the help articles, but the concerns being shared are around links to design or sensitive information being shared with competitors or being retained by staff after they leave the organisation. My understanding is that links can be managed quite securely and that tight control can be maintained by a list of links that have been made public, the ability to turn these off at any time and also the ability to only make certain spaces public (not all or nothing). We've been asked to consider guest access instead but by worry here is the time it takes to request and set these up is often not timely enough for the requirements we have to share with varying stakeholders across our organisation for different purposes. 

Am looking for some information/advice/use cases to help reassure our admin about why we should consider turning on public links for confluence

Thanks!

[Barbara Szczesniak]

@Siobhan Doyle Have you reviewed these pages:

• https://support.atlassian.com/confluence-cloud/docs/how-secure-are-public-links/ 
• https://support.atlassian.com/confluence-cloud/docs/share-content-externally-with-public-links/ 

I would think that your admin might be concerned by this part:

Who can access a public link

Anyone on the internet with the public link can view its content.

but perhaps reading through the rest of the information my help.