Who Has Access to Your Google Drive, and How to Remove It
Google Drive answers "who has access?" one file at a time. Right-click a file, choose Share, and you see that file's people and its General access setting. That works when you know which file you are worried about.
It does not answer the question most people are actually asking: who can open anything of mine, anywhere in my Drive? A folder shared three years ago. A link forwarded in an email you no longer have. A contractor whose project ended. Google has no screen that lists those together.
Free audit. Read-only. Nothing changes unless you approve it.
What you can do yourself, in Google Drive
These work, and cost nothing but time.
Find files shared by public link. In the Drive search bar, use the People filter and choose "Anyone with the link". This lists files and folders with link sharing switched on. (On a Workspace account, the same is available through advanced search.)
Find files shared with a specific person. Search for to: followed by their email address. This finds files you have shared directly with that address — useful when someone leaves.
Check a folder, not just the file. If a file is open and you never shared it, the access is usually inherited from a parent folder. Check the folder's sharing as well. Removing a person from a folder removes their access to everything inside it, unless a file inside was also shared directly.
Where this runs out: there is no single list of everyone who currently has access, no way to see which of your shared files are sensitive, and no way to fix many files at once. You are checking one item at a time, and it is easy to miss the one that matters.
What an audit shows that the manual checks do not
NeatDrive scans your Drive's file metadata and lists the exposures it finds in one place:
• Files shared by public link, with owner, full folder path, last modified date, type and size.
• Files shared with someone outside your account, listed by the person or domain that has access.
• Folders shared by link, and how many files inside inherit that access — usually the real cause when dozens of files turn out to be public at once.
• Sensitive-looking files first. Files whose names or types suggest tax documents, payroll, bank statements, contracts or ID are ranked to the top when they are also exposed. That intersection — sensitive and shared — is the part worth fixing today.
The audit is free, read-only, and reads metadata only: names, sizes, dates, owners and sharing settings. It cannot read what is inside your files.
Fixing it without breaking anything
Every change is staged for you to review first. You see each row, what it does, and what it affects, and nothing runs until you approve it.
• Public links are removed from the file, or from the folder when the sharing is inherited — in which case NeatDrive tells you how many files inside are affected before you approve.
• People and domains are removed from the files you choose.
• Fixing sharing deletes nothing. Files that get archived move to a NeatDrive Archive folder inside your own Drive, and undo puts them back where they were.
• Every action is written to an activity log you can export.
Applying changes requires a paid plan. Seeing what is exposed is free.
One thing worth knowing about folders
If a file is public because the folder it sits in is shared by link, Google will not let the sharing be removed from the file on its own. It has to be removed from the folder. This is why a "remove public access" attempt on individual files often fails — and why NeatDrive fixes it at the folder, telling you the blast radius first.
Is this a Workspace admin tool?
No. NeatDrive audits the Google Drive account of the person who connects it. It is not a domain-wide Workspace audit and it does not read other people's Drives. If you are an admin looking for an organisation-wide view, the Google Admin console's Drive log events and the domain-wide tools are the right place. If you want to know what your own account is exposing, this is for you.
Frequently asked
Can I see who has VIEWED my files?
For Google Docs, Sheets and Slides, Tools → Activity dashboard shows views. For other file types, Drive does not record who opened them. Access and views are different questions; this guide is about access.
Someone has access and I never shared with them. How?
Almost always an inherited folder share, or a link that was forwarded. Check the parent folder.
Can I remove access from many files at once?
Not in Drive itself, file by file is the only native route. That is the main thing an audit tool does for you.