Google Drive May Be Your Biggest AI Risk

Google Drive has quietly become one of the largest unmanaged data repositories inside most enterprises. It’s decades of documents, reports, contracts, and customer and employee data, stored, shared, and often forgotten.

Many files are link-shared to “anyone at company.” Others are orphaned, inherited, or duplicated. Owners leave, access remains. Poor labeling, low oversight, no audit trail.

That has been a problem for years, however, now AI copilots, enterprise search tools, and integrations with external platforms can surface any document the moment a prompt is issued. These systems don’t understand intent and only follow entitlements.

Ask an AI assistant to summarize “recent industry salary benchmarks,” and it surfaces an old HR file shared internally by link, exposing sensitive compensation data without warning.

Third-party AI apps like ChatGPT or Claude compound the problem. When connected to Workspace, they may gain access to entire folder trees without visibility or governance controls. These tools may even use all that content for model training, permanently exposing sensitive data. Many security teams don’t know which apps have been connected.

This shifts the risk from user error to platform exposure. To manage it, enterprises need a few concrete changes:

• Continuous classification. Not keyword matching but true semantic labeling of sensitive content as it’s created, modified, or inherited.
• Visibility into integrations. Know which apps and agents have access and set up monitoring and policies to prevent 3rd party unsanctioned apps.
• Blast radius reduction. Identify link-shared and orphaned content. Lock down wide-access files. Set policies for aging content.
• AI guardrails. Don’t deploy copilots, AI agents, or enterprise search tools before locking down your data surface.

One spreadsheet, shared with “anyone with a link,” could answer many wrong questions and leak sensitive data.

What’s the riskiest file still link-shared inside your org?

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