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Comment by sumitgt | Hacker News Reader

I want to use Kami, but I am worried by the fact that it asks for permission to your entire Google Drive.

Why doesn't Kami use the "https://www.googleapis.com/auth/drive.file permission" scope that gives only access to files created or opened with the app?

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This. I wish Google Drive had a way to give apps permission to access only one folder. i.e I want Kami to be able to only access the "pdfs" folder in my drive.

Right now it seems apps can either access everything or they are restricted to their own private app folder which is hidden somewhere in drive.

Yeah, the permissions system in Google Drive is quite limited - the only to get things to work reliably is to request permissions for everything which is obviously not ideal.

We used to use that, but unfortunately it's very buggy - we had many, many cases where a user would open a file with Kami, but the per-app permission would not be assigned by Google so it'd fail to open. For a while I had it so that we'd request the full drive access permission only if we hit that error, but in most cases it just meant we'd end up asking for permissions multiple times.

Probably the best option I can suggest if you don't want the permission is to use the open from local file button and choose a file from your synced drive folder or from the virtual drive folder on Chromebooks. You will lose the auto-saving to drive though.

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