livedocuments always works without signing in. You can land on a new document, build something real, and only later decide whether you want an account. To make that possible, every guest gets a quiet identity that owns whatever they make.
Your guest identity
The first time livedocuments needs to know who you are, your browser makes a quick trip to liveworkspace.app and back: a redirect you may glimpse for a moment, with nothing to fill in. liveworkspace gives this browser a guest identity and hands livedocuments a guest token for it, which your browser keeps and sends with each request. You never see or type it.
The guest identity is liveworkspace's, not livedocuments' alone, so it is the same guest in every liveworkspace app in this browser: a document you make on livedocuments and a canvas you make on livediagram belong to the same guest, and both appear in the Explorer when you choose All.
The token lasts a year, and livedocuments quietly fetches a fresh one when it has less than a month left, so a guest who comes back now and then keeps their identity.
New documents you make as a guest start in this browser (This Browser), listed under This Browser in the Explorer. Everything you put on livedocuments as a guest is owned by that identity: the documents you sync or make in a folder, your folders, favourites and your Shared With Me list.
As a guest you get the core of livedocuments: saving, share links and real-time collaboration all work. A few things need an address or an account to attach to, so they ask you to sign in: teams, API tokens, connecting an AI tool and email notifications.
What this means for your data
- It is per browser, not per person. The identity lives in one browser on one device. Open livedocuments in a different browser or on another device and you are a different guest there, so your earlier documents will not appear.
- Clearing site data can lose it. Clearing this browser's data for liveworkspace.app and livedocuments.app, or using private browsing that discards it, deletes your documents in This Browser and means your browser can no longer prove it is that guest. The documents are still on the server, but nothing in a fresh browser can claim them back.
Share links are the exception: anyone holding one, including you in another browser, can still open that document at the link's level. They just won't be its owner there.
If you want your documents to follow you across browsers and devices, signing in is the answer. When you sign in, whether to a new account or an existing one, everything your guest identity owns in this browser moves into the account, in every liveworkspace app at once, and we offer to move your documents in This Browser too.
Doing serious work as a guest? Sign in before clearing your browser data, so nothing is left behind.
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