How Kbee Uses Google Drive
Last updated by sandeep 2 years ago When you sign up for Kbee, Kbee will ask for permission to access your Google Drive:
Kbee needs this permission to set up a folder to store your content, share the folder with Kbee, and keep the content in the folder up to date.
Let’s dive deeper on why Kbee needs this permission and how Kbee uses it.
Permission Deep Dive
When you set up Kbee, one of the first things you are asked to do is set up your Google Drive folder.
Under the covers, Kbee shares the folder you create or choose with a special email address.
In order to share the folder, Kbee needs full access to your Drive. We know it’s crazy that something so simple needs all these permissions, but unfortunately that’s the only option Google gives.
Kbee scans the folder you selected and creates a map of all the files and folders inside of it. Files and folders outside of the folder you selected are never accessed by Kbee . The only time Kbee accesses files outside of the shared folder is when you explicitly copy or move files from other parts of Drive into the shared folder.
Once the special email account is added to the folder, Kbee uses it for creating pages from your docs. Kbee does not use your personal access token for creating your pages. Along with this, Kbee does not ever store your personal access token.
This has the added benefit of knowing exactly what files Kbee has access to and removing that access if required. Just look for the special email and remove it to rescind access.
Note: We are working on a “no-permissions” login, where you can manually share a folder with the special email address instead of giving Kbee permission to read your full Google Drive account. Check out our roadmap for more information .
Do my users need to give permission?
If you are using Kbee to power an external help center, your users do not need to sign in at all. Kbee is designed to be as lightweight as possible for your users. We do not store cookies or use 3rd party trackers on our viewer. Your user privacy is a top priority for us!
If you are using Kbee to power your internal knowledge base or wiki, Kbee will need to check that your users have access to the files and folder in Google Drive.
Depending on your configuration, Kbee may ask users to sign in with Google in order to check these permissions. Your users may see a screen asking to “View Drive Metadata”
This allows Kbee to check if the user can access files, but does not give Kbee permission to read or write to your users’ Google Drive. Kbee can only read the title and description of files.
Is my data secure?
The only data Kbee stores in its database is the names and file IDs of the files and folders inside of the folder you shared with Kbee. Kbee uses this information to create the structure of the web page and navigation menus.
Kbee does not store the contents of the articles on our servers. Instead, Kbee pushes pages to a CDN Cache . This allows you to provide your users with a lightning quick experience as well as optional SEO benefits for your organization.
Access is controlled by who has view access to the files in Drive. You can make content public as well. This article covers access management in more depth.
Search is powered by Algolia DocSearch . We use Algolia to index your content to automatically provide best-in-class search. This means a copy of your content is stored in a specialized machine-readable format in our private Algolia account. We do not use this content for anything other than powering search, and data is cleaned up every 7 days.
On the business tier, you can also host your own Algolia instance . With this option, Kbee will never have a permanent copy of your content.
Kbee has been audited by Google to use the Google Drive API, and our CTO worked at Google for over 5 years.
