¶ Displaying certificates
Once you have received a certificate, you can manage it and determine how it is shared, displayed or otherwise disseminated.
¶ Public or private
If you receive a personal certificate, it will be private by default. If you receive a certificate for an organisation or a thing, it may be public or private depending on the settings determined by the certification scheme owner.
When you first view your new certificate, you may see the following message to remind you that your new certificate is private and will need to be made public if you wish to use any of the dissemination tools to display your certificate.
A private certificate is viewable by only you, the issuer, us*, and anyone holding a valid share-link that you provide.
If a pdf certificate includes a QR code (generated from our placeholder), this code includes a share key that will enable the person with the pdf to use the QR code to reach the digital certificate even when set as private. This is because if they have the pdf, the certificate is already visible to them, and the QR code enables them to check that that what is being presented on the pdf is indeed valid.
A public certificate is viewable by anyone visiting the platform. Any associated smart badges that you have added to your website or your email footer using our embed code will be visible. A personal certificate will appear on your profile page, an organisation's certificate will appear on the organisation's profile page, and a thing's certificate will appear on the thing's profile page.
Only you (and we*) can change the public or private status of a certificate once it has been issued. The issuer can see this status, but cannot change it.
By *us or *we, we mean some of our designated staff working in customer service, content moderation, and some software testing roles can view private certificates. However, we treat this information as client confidential.
The status can be changed by you, the recipient:
- Via the 'Received certificates' page on the respective table or card entry of the certificate under 'visibility'.
- On the digital certificate itself (via the globe icon in the top righthand corner of the certificate)
- On the digital certificate menu (under the 'Actions' section)
If you change a certificate from public to private, any smart badges you have displayed will be invisible until you return the status to public. You can't set up a new smart badge whilst the certificate is private.