We have received a couple of questions about the 'privacy' of chemical structure searching of our chembldb interface. The root of these questions seems to be 'Is it safe for me to search with a proprietary structure?'. There are probably two components to this - privacy over the route to our servers, and the privacy of the query once it gets on to our site. Basically, we're not interested in what you are searching for, we don't store the queries at all, and have no desire to disclose this sort of data to anyone; however, there are a number of things we could do in the short-term to address some potential corporate/IP concerns.
We would also welcome contact/discussion to help us develop our longer term 'privacy' strategy for chembldb.
The image is from the excellent xkcd.....
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