No worries – asking questions is what the forum is here for.
The best analogy I can make about publish to web is this – when you publish to web it is like putting your information on a roadside billboard. After putting that billboard up, you may try to cover it with a sheet (put it behind a secure portal), but even after doing so, the information on the Billboard is “out in the wild”. Someone may have taken a picture of that billboard before it got covered and shared that picture (and the billboard actually includes tools that encourage sharing). In addition, when you posted the billboard you gave the rights to that information to the billboard company and they may have chosen to share it. There are also ways for people who want to do so to look “under the sheet” and still access that information even after it’s covered up. And finally, your license with the billboard company technically prohibits you from putting sheets over their billboards.
So, given that should you use publish to web? To me, that depends entirely on the magnitude of the adverse consequence of the information becoming public. If the reaction is “meh, that’s annoying but ultimately no big deal”, then using it may be worth the cost savings of purchasing and administering a bunch of Pro licenses. If the reaction is “we now have a major data breach that someone has to answer to senior management for”, then probably not… But the key is just to be informed about the nature and extent of the risks so you can do your own accurate calculation of expected benefit/cost.
Here’s a good article that makes many of the above points in a different way:
I hope this is helpful.
- Brian