Most document leaks inside organisations are not hacks. They are links: a convenient "anyone with the link" URL pasted into the wrong chat, forwarded onward, and cached in someone's personal notes forever. The sharing dialog offers four scopes; knowing them turns a security decision into a two-second choice.
The Four Link Scopes
- Specific people — only the named recipients can open it, even if the link escapes. The default for anything sensitive.
- People in your organisation — any signed-in colleague. Fine for internal reference material, wrong for personal or client-confidential content.
- People with existing access — simply copies a pointer without granting anything new; the safest option when you are unsure.
- Anyone (anonymous) — no sign-in required. If your organisation allows it at all, treat it as publishing to the internet, because that is precisely what it does.
Edit, View, and the Small Print
Scope answers who; rights answer what. Grant view unless the recipient must change the document — reviewers who cannot accidentally restructure your table are reviewers who cause fewer incidents. Two additional toggles deserve habit status: block download for view-only sensitive material, and expiration date for anything shared outside the team. An expiring link fails closed: when the project ends, access ends without anyone remembering to clean up.
The forwarding problem
Organisation-wide and anonymous links travel: recipients forward them, and the forward works. Specific-people links do not — a forwarded link asks the new holder to request access, which surfaces the attempt to you. When in doubt about a recipient list, choose specific people and let the request flow educate you about who actually needs the file.
Permissions Inherit Downward
A link to a folder grants access to everything inside it, including files added later. This is powerful for project workspaces and dangerous for personal folders. Before sharing a folder, open its management view and read the effective access list: direct members, inherited groups, and link-based access each appear separately, and link-based access is the line people forget to check.
Auditing and Cleaning Up
- Quarterly, review the sharing report your admin centre provides for files shared externally.
- Remove anonymous links first; they are the only scope that strangers can use without being invited.
- Replace long-lived organisation-wide links on sensitive documents with specific-people links.
- When an employee leaves, their personally shared links die with their account in most configurations — another reason sensitive material should live in channel libraries, not personal spaces.
When Someone Asks for Access
Access requests arrive by email and in the file's management view. Answer them with the narrowest scope that solves the requester's stated need, and say no to "just give me edit on everything in that folder" unless the requester can name the everything. Narrow grants are not distrust; they are the reason the audit next quarter takes minutes.
Links decide who can reach a file; search decides whether anyone can find it again. The next chapter covers searching messages, files and people effectively — the most underused skill in the entire app.
