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Use cases → Documents and Drive

Detect and flag Drive documents violating policy across a domain

Identify and label documents matching compliance or security triggers in Drive, using delegated access and domain-wide search.

Who it is forSecurity, compliance and data governance teams monitoring Drive content.
APIsDrive API, Admin SDK
Typical scopesdrive, admin.directory.user.readonly

The problem

Sensitive or non-compliant content spreads easily in shared Drives and user My Drives, but manual checks can't keep up. Teams need a way to programmatically scan and flag documents at scale, without relying on users to self-report.

How it works

  1. Enumerate users with the Admin SDK and impersonate each in turn.
  2. Use the Drive API to search for files matching policy triggers (e.g. sharing settings, keywords, DLP matches).
  3. For each violating file, apply a Drive label, add a warning comment, or move to a review folder.
  4. Record actions and file IDs for audit and deduplication.

What changes

Documents violating policy are systematically flagged or quarantined, supporting incident review and user notification at scale.

The trap in this one. Drive API search results are eventually consistent and can lag behind real-time changes, especially after permission or content updates. If your scan processes a file before a recent policy violation propagates, you will miss it and may not revisit it for days. For critical policies, add a re-scan step or maintain a change log to catch late-arriving violations.

Questions people ask

Can this flag files in Shared Drives as well as My Drive?

Yes, but you must enumerate both user drives and shared drives separately. Use the drive type filter in the API to avoid missing content.

What is the best way to avoid flagging the same file multiple times?

Record flagged file IDs and timestamps in durable storage. Before acting, check if the file has already been processed for the same violation.

Want this built?

This is a pattern we run in production. We will set up the delegation and build this on top of it — $500 per hour, most of it working the same day.

Talk to us Or read the setup guide

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