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Syncing a Google Drive Folder Without Sharing Everything

LLumen Chat Team2 min read

A common worry with connecting Drive to any third-party tool is scope: does it get access to everything, or just what you actually want it to read? For a support chatbot, you almost always want the latter.

Connect and choose a folder, not an account

From Document Sources, select Google Drive and authorize through Google's standard OAuth flow. Once connected, Lumen Chat shows a folder picker pulled from your Drive — you choose one folder, and only the files inside it (and its subfolders) are ever read.

There's no step where "connect Drive" silently means "index every document I own." If you later want to add a second folder, you add it as a separate source with its own selection.

What gets indexed

Docs, Sheets, Slides, and PDFs stored in the selected folder are converted and chunked so the chatbot can retrieve the right passage for a question, the same way it would for any other source. Folder structure doesn't matter — what matters is what's inside the folder you picked.

Revoking access

Because access is scoped to a folder via OAuth, disconnecting the source in Lumen Chat and revoking the app from your Google account permissions fully removes access — there's nothing left over to clean up.

Related reading

If your team already keeps a support-facing folder in Drive, it's the fastest way to get a chatbot live: connect your Drive folder and pick exactly what should be public-facing.

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