Salesforce List View Shared Only with Partner Users is Visible to Internal Users

In Salesforce, you may find that a list view shared exclusively with all Partner Users is also visible to certain internal users, even though it was not explicitly shared with them.

This occurs because of how Salesforce handles the role hierarchy for partner users. Under specific conditions, an internal user may be designated as the manager of a partner user who belongs to a partner group. In these scenarios, Salesforce considers the internal user (the manager) to also be a member of that partner group through role hierarchy inheritance.

This membership does not change the internal user's actual user type — they are not converted to a partner user. However, Salesforce marks them with a partner user visibility indicator, which allows them to see content shared solely with partner users.