Protection and Safety of Uploaded Documents
Protecting your sensitive documents plays a major role at PlagAware. We therefore want to explain in detail what happens to your documents after you have uploaded them to our server.
Handling of Uploaded Documents
If you pass a document to PlagAware, the document is stored temporarily on our server. After successful upload, the text content of the document is extracted and your original file is deleted from our server immediately. In exceptional cases, we store the original file on our server in order to analyze errors that occurred during the extraction of the text contents. These temporary files are automatically deleted 7 days after upload.
The text content of the original file will be transferred to our database in order to perform the plagiarism scan for the specified text. It will be stored in our database until you request the deletion of the plagiarism scan in your user area.
Documents that you uploaded into your personal library, are treated in the same manner and transferred to our database. They can be deleted anytime in your user area.
Access to Uploaded Documents
Texts that you uploaded for plagiarism assessment can only be accessed via your user area. The same applies to the result reports of your plagiarism scans, as the reports will in most cases include sections of your source documents. An exception are the so-called "permanent links" to an assessment report. This feature allows you to share and publish any report using a publicly accessible URL, as long as the report has not been deleted within your user area. The "permanent link" consists of a pseudo-random 30-digit alphanumeric sequence with about 6E30 combinations. Thus, guessing a valid permanent link by automated trials (brute force attack) is not possible.
As well, texts in your personal library can be opened and viewed only through your user account. Likewise library texts can never be used for plagiarism scans by third parties. This also applies if multiple user accounts are assigned to the same license key. If result reports contain sources from a private library, the full text of these sources can only be accessed after registration and authentication in PlagAware.
Backup Policy
The databases of PlagAware and generated reports are backed up to archive files every day in order to prevent data loss. The backup data is stored for up to 3 days and will be automatically deleted after this time. As a consequence, your text contents (but not the original file) could be recovered in a period of 3 days even after you have triggered deletion manually.
