Google has announced that they are adding expiration dates for users accessing files in Google Drive, Docs, Sheets, and Slides.
The expiring access is an extension of the Information Rights Management (IRM) features that Google introduced last July. Information Rights Management allowed admins to disable downloading, printing, and copying of any Google Drive file that was under their control. With expiration dates, Google is again extending control, though this time it’s intended as a tool to limit access to data for users like contractors with file access expiring at the end of their contract.
Google states that you can’t limit access to files for file owners, or any user with edit access, but anyone with comment or view access can certainly be locked out after a pre-set period of time.
Google is looking to roll the feature out to users over the next 2-3 months, though Google Apps customers will have to wait until late Q2 later this year to get the feature.
