citeKeeper was designed by attorneys with privacy in mind. At the same time, however, much of citeKeeper's power comes from using crowdsourcing to identify the best authority. This help topic explains how citeKeeper balances these two competing goals.
Because privacy is so important, citeKeepr includes reminders on key pages. Wherever you see a question mark next to the word 'privacy', you can hover over the question mark to learn more about the privacy rules for information on that screen.
The information below describes privacy in detail. But the general rules are simple: cases, quotes, and tags are visible to all. Everything else is private if you are not a member of a firm, and can be viewed only by other members of your firm if you are a member of a firm.
As a general rule, information that is public is visible to everyone. Case names, citations, and quotes from cases are all public information. When you add a quote or case, it is visible to all citeKeeper users. To maintain the privacy of your research, citeKeeper does not reveal who added any particular quotes or cases.
Of course, if you are adding a quote, you are probably also going to tag it. Tags are not public information; however they are nonetheless visible to everyone.
Unlike cases and quotes, snippets represent your own unique work product. Snippets are therefore not generally visible to others. Only other members of your firm can see them. If you are not a member of a firm, nobody but you can see your snippets. When you leave a firm, members can no longer see your snippets.
Projects are designed to provide increased privacy to allow attorneys to work together privately. Ordinarily, individual users cannot work with other users on the site. Firm users can work with other members of their firm, but cannot shield their work from other members who either do not want to see it or perhaps are firewalled. The project framework is designed to flexibly accomodate the need to work with attorneys outside of your firm and to screen your work from attorneys in your firm.
Information in a project can only be viewed by members of the project. When you create a project, you are the only member. You can invite additional members from the "admin" section of the project page. Only the project owner (the person who created the project) can invite new users.
Currently, comments are also always public as well. Users should consider whether a comment will be helpful to other attorneys when posting, and should be mindful of any privilege or confidentiality obligations they may have.