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Guides / Spec Intake / Sharing and privacy Spec Intake

Sharing and privacy

Why there is no password, why the address stays private, and what the form does and does not record.

There is no password — on purpose

The form has no login. That is a decision, recorded when the app was set up, not an oversight: it is a small internal tool for a couple of people, and a login was judged more protection than it needs.

The flip side is that anyone who has the web address can submit. Nothing else stands in the way — no password, no approval step, no limit on how many rows a stranger could add. The address is the only protection there is.

What you do

  1. Treat the form’s address like a key: use it yourself, don’t post it or forward it.
  2. If you think the address has leaked — strange rows appearing in the spreadsheet, or you learn it was shared on — tell the person who looks after the app. Putting a login in front was planned for exactly that case and is a quick change.

(The page also tells search engines not to index it, so it will not turn up in search results — but that is a request, not a lock, and it does not change the advice above.)

“Submitted By” is a claim, not proof

The Submitted By name is picked from a droplist by whoever is filling in the form. The server refuses any value that is not on the list, so the column can only ever hold one of the known names — but nothing verifies that the person picking a name really is that person. Read it as who says they wrote this, a convenience label for telling entries apart. Never treat it as evidence, and never base an approval or a permission on it.

What is recorded, and where

A submission stores exactly four things, all visible in the shared spreadsheet: the spec type, the description you typed, the name you picked, and the time the row was saved. Everyone who can open the spreadsheet can see every row, so write descriptions accordingly.

Nothing else about you is stored by the app. The choices it “remembers” — your usual spec type, your name, your site — live only in the browser on your own device, never on the server. Clearing that browser’s site data simply makes the form forget them; you pick them again next time, and nothing in the spreadsheet changes.