Accessing GDrive and Google Sheets without giving all permissions

Questions
1

:bullseye: What is your goal?

Read files from one Google drive folder and write to one spreadsheet

:thinking: What is the problem & what have you tried?

While creating GDrive connection I’m asked to give read/write permissions to my whole personal drive. I don’t want to give make.com so wide permissions.
I just want to give read access to one folder and write to one spreadsheet.

2

Hello,

Welcome to the community @WBob,

It’s always a pleasure to read posts where users take security seriously :slight_smile:

With standard OAuth connections in tools like Make, access is defined by scopes (e.g. full Drive write access), not by specific folders or files - so you usually can’t restrict it to just one folder at the authorization level.

There are two practical ways to handle this:

  1. Service account
    Create a service account and share only the specific folder or spreadsheet with it via Google Drive / Google Sheets. This way, the integration has access only to what you explicitly share - nothing more. Unfortunately, this setup is rather advanced.

  2. Dedicated Google account (simplest setup)
    Create a separate Google account and give it access only to the required folder or spreadsheet using standard Google Sharing. Then connect that account to Make.

The second option is usually the fastest and easiest to implement. If you secure the account with a strong password and MFA, it’s also a very safe approach in practice, as you don’t need to work with Cloud Console or create custom connections.

In both cases, you avoid granting access to your entire personal Drive.

Have a nice day,
Michal

3

@mszymkowiak For a private account (not Google Workspace), if you add a strong password and MFA, can you connect to make without the cloud console?
I understand correctly?