>When a paper is submitted to Turnitin, it is compared against a vast, secure proprietary database of licensed source material, including millions of periodical

>When a paper is submitted to Turnitin, it is compared against a vast, secure proprietary database of licensed source material, including millions of periodicals, academic journals, books, and web pages. Turnitin also maintains a separate repository of student papers. Each institution (at the discretion of his or her school administrator) can determine whether or not to include student papers in the repository. We can remove student papers from the standard repository at the request of a school administrator. https://help.turnitin.com/Privacy_and_Security/Privacy_and_Security.htm https://help.turnitin.com/Privacy_and_Security/Privacy_and_S... So your school or university are really deciding whether your paper is stored for future plagiarism checks.