My last post talked about Dashboard Extension security, in short, Sandboxed extensions are safe to use while network extensions are not safe to use. This blog focuses Explain Data and Data Story security concerns.

Is Explain Data safe to turn on for the server or site?

Yes

Explain Data Concerns: It may expose data in data sources used but not available in the dashboards. However Explain Data will not send data outside your Tableau server. Which is why Explain Data is safe to turn on for admins.

On the other side, Explain Data can be controlled at each workbook level (on or off with default ON). Even Explain Data is turned on at server and site level, for specific workbook, the workbook owner has option to turn Explain Data off.

One beatific thing about Explain Data is that it is available for all workbooks on the server/site, include those workbooks created before 2021.2 although Explain Data is released only as part of 2021.2 release.

Next, let’s look at Data Story.

Is Data Story safe to turn on for the server or site?

Yes

What is the Data Story’s risk from Data and Security perspective? The only risk for Data Story is that Hidden worksheet data can be used on Data Story.

Good thing about Data Story is that it will not send data outside Tableau server as Data Stories doesn’t use generative AI, large language models (LLMs), or machine learning to write insights and stories.

Summary: Both Explain Data and Data Story are safe to use. Default is ON for both features and the default is good.