What is a private document in Maditon, and how is it protected?

Only an upload can be private: a page a supplier publishes is public by definition. Any member or admin can mark an upload private on its page, or make it public again; the change takes effect immediately.

What private means. The document is still read, and its findings still show on its own page and in the supplier’s cross-check — those are your own readings of your own copy. Questionnaire drafts never see it: when a supplier or system you rely on has a private document, the questionnaire workspace names them, so you know to check that agreement by hand. Private documents are included in your Data Act export, because they are yours, and in your PDF packages, which are for your own filing.

How it is protected. Beyond the encryption at rest that covers all customer content, a private document is encrypted by the application itself: a data key is created for your organisation on the first private upload, wrapped under a master key that lives only in the application’s runtime environment, never in the database. The file in object storage, the extracted text, the AI reading of it, the passages that reading quotes and their translations are all stored as ciphertext and decrypted only in memory, for the reader, the comparison, the SLA view and the exports. Marking a document private encrypts it; un-marking decrypts it; replacing the file keeps the state. This protects the content in a database dump, a backup, storage read outside the application or a mis-scoped query. It does not protect against a compromise of the application host, which holds the master key — the security page says so in as many words.

Replacing the file. A newer version of an uploaded document — private or not — is uploaded on the same document, which keeps its links to systems, its notes, its history and its earlier readings; the new file becomes the current text and is read again.