Your Boss Can Read All Of Your G Suite Email Drafts, Former Google’s Employee Reveals

If your company is using Google’s G Suite, including Gmail, Google Drive, Google Docs, and Google Calendar, it is highly likely that your bosses know everything you have done on these devices.

This has been the case for so many years yet not many people notice it, until recently when Martin Shelton, a former employee of Google, posted a long blog post about all the ways Google can have access to your G Suite account’s content. He is now working as a principal researcher for the Freedom of the Press Foundation. He also noted that if someday Google is compelled to hand over your personal data to the government, it will do so.

"Documents within your G Suite domain are not end-to-end encrypted, meaning that Google has everything they need to read your data," Shelton writes. 

Shelton also pointed out that your employers have access to everything you do on the G Suite account, depending on the version your company is using. Your bosses may know as much as whether you open a file on Google Drive.

"It’s important to note that your administrator has access to any data you store in this account, including your email," Google confirmed. 

Some people may have known this already. All of the emails you send by the company’s account should be work-related anyway. So it is not so weird when your employers or IT head can read them. However, it might take several users by surprise that administrators can read their draft email live, something Shelton said they could do.

So be careful with what you write, even if you do not intend to send it. Your bosses may know about the frustrating emails you wanted to send them but then had a change of heart.

There is always someone watching these days.