IT admin control over syncing feature?

fhud

I would very much like to use Zotero at work (a defence contractor) however IT are currently refusing to give their approval, because they're concerned about the security of the sync feature.

Is it possible for IT admin to control use of the sync feature? I.e. are they able to turn it off so that users cannot sync, and cannot re-enable the sync feature? If this is possible then they may allow me to use it.

dstillman

There's no built-in way to disable syncing in Zotero, though it's not enabled by default — someone would have to set up an account. Our privacy policy details every piece of information that Zotero might upload and how to avoid such requests.

To prevent syncing on a network level, they could block api.zotero.org, though currently that would also break retraction notifications (which are done in a fully privacy-preserving manner) and might break other advanced functionality in the future. If they choose to do that, we'd hope that they would communicate clearly to users, who would just get a generic network error and might come to us for support.

We can consider offering some way to disable syncing via system policy in the future.

Syncing aside, Zotero needs browser-equivalent web access to function properly.