Private recordings, shared with just the people you choose

Up to now, every recording you sent to your team's library was visible to the whole team. That's the right default for async work, and it's still the default. But it isn't right for everything.

So we've added a simple control. Any recording can now be one of two things: visible to your team, or private to you and the specific people you share it with.

How it works

Open a recording and you'll find a sharing control with two options.

Team is the default. Everyone in your organisation can open it, the same as before.

Private flips it the other way. The recording is visible to you, and to nobody else, until you add people. You pick the teammates who should see it, and only they can. Leave the list empty and it stays private to just you.

That's the whole thing. No new place to learn, no separate settings page. It sits right on the recording.

Why team stays the default

Pixelmatic exists so teams can share context without booking another call. That only works when sharing is the easy, normal thing, so team-visible is still what happens unless you say otherwise.

Private is for the smaller set of recordings that shouldn't be team-wide. A walkthrough about one person's work. A sensitive bug. A rough draft you're not ready to put in front of everyone. For those, you reach for private and choose who's in.

We didn't want privacy to be the kind of feature you have to think about every time you record. You shouldn't. Record, share with your team, get on with your day. Private is there for the few times you need it.

The part we thought hardest about

Here's the decision that took the most thinking. When you mark a recording private, who can override that?

The common answer is that admins and owners can see everything. It's convenient, and on a spreadsheet it looks like control.

We went the other way. If you make a recording private, it's private. An admin can't quietly open it. An owner can't either. There's no backdoor, on purpose.

The reason is trust. "Private" should mean what the word says. If a private recording were only private from your peers but open to whoever holds the top role, then it isn't really private, it's just private from some people. We'd rather it mean the plain thing.

That carries through to search, too. We shipped library-wide search a while back so you can find any recording by what was said in it. A private recording stays out of those results for anyone you haven't shared it with. So it won't surface in a search by transcript, by title, or by tag. Private is private in the list, on the page, and in search, or it isn't private at all.

A couple of honest limits

If a recording is already published, with a public link out in the world, you can't flip it to private while that link exists. There's a public copy out there already, so making the original private wouldn't undo that. Unpublish it first, then make it private.

And here's what's still open. Right now, control of a private recording sits with the person who made it. That's the behaviour we wanted, but it has an edge we haven't fully settled: if someone leaves the team, recordings they kept private to themselves don't automatically pass to anyone. I'd rather name that plainly than pretend it's solved. We're working out the cleanest way to handle it, and I'll say so here when we do.

The short version

Most recordings should be seen by your team, so that's still the default. The ones that shouldn't can now be private, shared with exactly the people you choose, and private really does mean private.

Until next time!

Wouter
Founder