drive.file scope

drive.file is a Google OAuth scope - a permission level an app requests when you connect your Google account. Unlike the broad Drive scopes, which grant an app the ability to read or modify everything in your Drive, drive.file restricts the app to exactly two categories of files: files you explicitly selected through Google's file picker, and files the app itself created. Everything else in your Drive is invisible to it.

The distinction is the difference between handing over a single folder and handing over your keys. An app holding a full Drive scope can enumerate, read, and change any document you own; an app holding drive.file cannot even see that other files exist. Google classifies the broad scopes as sensitive or restricted and subjects apps requesting them to verification review, precisely because of what a compromise or a misbehaving app could do with them.

For users, the scope requested is a useful trust signal. When a spreadsheet tool only needs to write into sheets you choose, drive.file is sufficient - an app asking for more than the job requires is worth a second look.

SheetLink Forms' one-click Google Sheets connection uses drive.file only. The service can write to precisely two kinds of spreadsheets: sheets you pick in the Google picker during setup, and sheets it creates for you inside the product - never the rest of your Drive. On an empty sheet it seeds a header row, then appends each submission as a row under those headers, talking directly to the Google Sheets API.

The scope choice, along with the formula-injection guard and the rest of the data-handling posture, is documented on the security page; connecting a sheet is shown on how it works.