Does Jupyter Notebook or Lab risk exposing data via the web?

Question

I’m very new to Jupyter and seeing that it is browser based. If I use Jupyter via Anaconda, does this mean that data is actually being sent out to the web for a notebook to work, or only that it is running via my browser software (but always locally)? I will be working with sensitive data and would like to understand any security issues connected to the Jupyter approach. Finally, are there any differences in this context between Jupyter Notebooks and Jupyter Lab?

Answer 1

Jupyter Notebooks are, by default, only accessible from the computer they're running on. So if you're using a laptop and start a notebook up you'll be the only person who can access it.

From their website-

By default, a notebook server runs locally at 127.0.0.1:8888 and is accessible only from localhost. You may access the notebook server from the browser using http://127.0.0.1:8888.

It is possible to override that to share notebooks, but if you do you should add authentication to prevent anyone from being able to access the information. Also you should keep in mind that anyone who can access the notebook can also run code on that machine, which has a lot of security implications.