Private documents: only for you and your participants

A private document is visible to its owner and to the people you add as participants, and nobody else. For everyone else in your account it is as if it did not exist, including the account Owner, people with Technical administration permissions and Supervisors.

How to mark it

Open the document. You must be its owner (the person listed in «Owner»).
Click the padlock button in the header of the document and confirm.
The document gets a dark Private label (with a padlock) in the lists, in the Kanban and in the document header. You will find it under «My documents».

To remove it, click the padlock again. The document stops being private and goes back to the normal rules (for example, the account Owner will see it under «Others»).

You can also ask Kairos («mark this document as private»); the same rules apply.

Who can see it

You, who marked it.
The participants of the document. If you add someone as a participant they see it right away (with the Private label); if you remove them, they stop seeing it.
Nobody else, anywhere in WorkOS: the Documents lists and Kanban (not even under «Others» or «My team»), searches, @mentions, the Documents tabs of a Project, a Company or a Contact, Kairos and the Claude or ChatGPT connector.
Mentions of that document inside tasks, notes, projects or other records show as «Private document», with no title or link, for anyone who cannot open it.

If someone without access tries to open it with a direct link, they get the same message as for a document that does not exist.

What a participant can do

A participant sees the document, reads it and edits it like any other. What they cannot do, because it belongs to whoever marked it private:

Change the participants or the owner.
Share it with a client or link contacts.
Remove the private mark.

Sharing it with a client

By default, a private document cannot be shared with clients: the client portal does not open it for anyone (neither the client's contacts nor you with your own email). To share it, open «Share» and turn on «Allow this private document to be shared in the client portal» (only the person who marked it as private sees it). With it on, the document works like any other: the client contacts linked to the document or to its project will open it through the portal with their email code (and so will you and your participants with your email). Think twice before linking a private document to a project: every contact of that project will be able to open it in the portal while the option is on. You can turn it off at any time and the portal stops opening it immediately. If you remove the private mark and set it again, the option starts off again.

Limits worth knowing

Participants are registered by their user at the moment you add them. If someone did not yet have a WorkOS account when you added them, save the participants again once they do. Adding participants directly in Notion does not give them access to a private document: do it from WorkOS.
It is private in WorkOS, not in Notion. Anyone with access to your Notion workspace can still see the page there.
Drive: the attached files of a private document stop being copied to Drive and are kept only in Notion. Anything already in its Drive folder is not deleted and that folder stops syncing; if you want it gone, remove it by hand in Drive. When you remove the private mark, new files are copied again.
The mark is tied to your WorkOS user. Participants' access follows their Team record, which is how they were added.
If the owner leaves the team, that person cannot be removed while they have private documents: they must first make them public or delete them. If they are no longer available, a platform administrator can release them.
If you already consulted the document with Kairos before making it private, that conversation keeps what was read (only you can see it).
A signed document can be private: the signature lock and privacy are independent.
To be able to mark documents as private, your record in Team must be linked to your user.