Does a plotly dash dashboard publish data online?

Question

I am confused about the privacy of plotly and dash hosted locally through flask.

Given a project of hosting a dash dashboard with Flask to users on my local network:

If I deploy a Dash app using a Flask server as per the user guide to deployment (https://plot.ly/dash/deployment), i.e.:

import flask
import dash

server = flask.Flask(__name__)
app = dash.Dash(__name__, server=server)

If I serve data to the dash app, is this published online anywhere (i.e. the plotly website)?

What if I create a graph such as a plotly.graph_objs.Figure in a dash_core_components.Graph? Will data served to this figure be published online? Or do I have to specify using plotly.offline.plot to ensure it doesn't connect to an external server, similar to a notebook using plotly?

Answer 1

The documentation is indeed a bit confusing. Based on the four points below I would assume that no data is uploaded to the cloud.

• Your Flask app needs to be explicitly uploaded to the cloud, otherwise nothing will happen (https://plot.ly/python/create-online-dashboard/#upload-dashboard).

• In addition you don't need a Plotly account to create a Dash app, but you do need an account to upload a graph.

• Dash works locally without an internet connection, so no data can be uploaded

• There is no code indicating upload in the Dash code