Google Drive’s Shared Drives just got a critical, long-overdue security feature

Shared Drives are the cornerstone of collaboration in Google Workspace, but they’ve always had one massive, frustrating limitation compared to “My Drive”: the inability to easily set an expiration date on sharing. If you brought in a temporary contractor, partner, or client, you had to manually remember to go back and revoke their access, creating a potential security loophole and a constant administrative burden.

In a fantastic and highly-requested update, Google is finally fixing this. The company has announced it is rolling out the ability to set expiring access for both files and folders directly from the sharing dialog in Shared Drives.

How the new expiring access works

This update, which was previously only available for files via a complex API, brings two crucial new controls directly to the user interface:

• File Expirations (All Roles): You can now set a specific expiration date when sharing any file within a Shared Drive. This is perfect for temporary collaborators, as their access will be automatically revoked on that date, eliminating the need for any manual cleanup.
• Folder Expirations (Viewer Role): For folders in a Shared Drive, you can now apply an expiration date specifically to the Viewer role. This is a great way to automatically remove read-only access for a group after a project’s review phase is complete.

A logical fix for “My Drive” permissions, too

Alongside this Shared Drive update, Google is also standardizing the expiration behavior in “My Drive” to make it more predictable and logical.

• Old Behavior: If you gave someone “Viewer” access to a parent folder but temporary “Editor” access to a file inside it, they would lose all access to that file when their Editor permission expired.
• New Behavior: Now, when their temporary “Editor” access expires, their permission will simply revert to the access they have on the parent folder (in this case, “Viewer”). They won’t be completely locked out of the file.

This is a huge quality-of-life and security win for anyone managing collaborative projects in Google Workspace. The new feature is rolling out gradually starting November 4, 2025, and will be available to a wide range of users, including most Google Workspace tiers (Business, Enterprise, Education, etc.) and subscribers to Google One AI Premium, Google AI Pro, and Ultra.