Google Workspace sharing policies

See how Material uses your Google Workspace sharing policies to detect truly public files.

Material uses your Google Workspace organizational unit and group Drive sharing policies to decide whether a file is truly shared externally or publicly. When your policies keep a file login-restricted, Material no longer flags it as publicly shared, so you don't spend time on file issues for links that can't be opened from outside your organization.

Material applies your sharing policies only after you grant the sharing-policy permission. Until you grant it, your file detections work exactly as they do today.

How Material resolves your sharing policies

For each file, Material determines the effective sharing policy the same way Google Workspace does, then uses it when evaluating your file detections.

File location	Policy Material applies
My Drive	The file owner's organizational unit policy
Shared drive	The organizational unit the shared drive belongs to

Groups can override organizational unit policies. When a user belongs to a group that has its own sharing policy, Material applies that policy.

If Material can't interpret a sharing policy, it falls back to its standard detection behavior for that file.

Grant the sharing-policy permission

Material needs a read-only permission to read your Google Workspace Drive sharing policies. Until you grant it, Material can't tell which files your policies keep login-restricted.

To grant the permission, click Action Required: Grant additional permissions in the bottom left, then click Review permissions and follow the prompts.

Until you grant the permission, your file detections behave as before and may flag files as publicly shared even when your sharing policies keep them login-restricted.

New customers grant this permission during onboarding.

When a sharing policy changes

When you change a Drive sharing policy in Google Workspace, Material updates the files that policy affects and automatically opens or closes file issues to match. Stale issues clear on their own, and new issues appear where a policy now exposes a file. This can take up to a day or two to fully reflect.

Viewing policy details on a file

When a sharing policy applies to a file, Material shows the relevant policy information on the file's detail page, so you can see why a file was or wasn't flagged as externally shared.