Asset visibility and deletion

Public versus private

• Public assets are web-served, anyone with the URL can fetch them. This is what embedded survey images must be, participants' browsers load them directly. Public is the default for uploads.
• Private assets have no URL at all. They live outside the web-served area and can be opened or downloaded only by you, through permission-checked requests. Use private for confidential spreadsheets and any file that must not be publicly fetchable, a private spreadsheet still works fine as a rating-items import source.

Each card shows its state, a lock chip marks private files, and the toggle icons switch state. Both directions warn you about consequences before switching

• Public to private breaks every existing embed of that file. If surveys use it, the warning lists them by name and asks for explicit confirmation.
• Private to public exposes the file to anyone holding the URL. The warning states this in plain terms, confirm only when the file is safe to publish.

Deleting

Deleting an asset moves it to the Assets Recycle Bin. Two important behaviors

• If the asset is used by surveys, the delete warns first and lists the affected surveys.
• A deleted public asset is immediately made private, its links stop working at deletion time, not at some later purge. Restoring it from the bin restores its previous visibility, links resume working.

From the Recycle Bin, Restore brings the file back, Delete forever erases the file's bytes from storage permanently, this cannot be undone.

What deletion never touches

Deleting a survey does not delete the assets it used, your library is independent of any one survey. The reverse is also true, deleting an asset never edits surveys, an embed whose asset disappeared simply stops rendering and should be cleaned up in the affected questions.