cloudHQ’s full privacy policy is available at https://www.cloudhq.net/privacy.

The short version as it applies to Secure Document Sharing: your files stay in your Google Drive and are never copied, mirrored, or warehoused on cloudHQ servers; at download time the file is streamed on demand from your Drive using the OAuth credentials you authorized and is not retained afterwards. We never see, transmit, or store your Google password. All Drive access is granted through Google’s standard OAuth consent flow, which you can revoke at any time from your Google Account security settings. Share passwords are stored hashed, never in plain text. All traffic between recipients, our service, and Google Drive is encrypted with HTTPS / TLS. We do not sell, rent, or share your personal data with third parties for marketing purposes, and we do not use the contents of your files for advertising, machine-learning training, or any purpose beyond delivering the file to the recipient you authorized. We log per-visitor IP, approximate location, and timestamp for your audit dashboard — that audit data belongs to you and is visible only to you and to anyone you grant access to your cloudHQ account.

Because the default way of sharing a Google Drive file (a public “anyone with the link” URL) gives you almost no control once the link leaves your inbox, and the alternative (a heavyweight file-sharing portal that recipients must sign up for) creates friction that kills adoption. Secure Document Sharing by cloudHQ sits exactly in the middle: it is as easy as a regular Drive link from the sender’s side) two clicks in the Gmail compose toolbar ) but it gives you password protection, an automatic expiration date, optional geographic and IP-based restrictions, a per-recipient audit log showing who opened the file and from where, the ability to pause or revoke any share at any moment, and a branded download page that reinforces your own identity rather than Google’s.

Your files never leave your Google Drive and cloudHQ does not store, copy, or train on them. So you keep the privacy and storage benefits of Drive while gaining the access controls and audit trail that regulated industries (legal, healthcare, finance, HR, government) actually require. Recipients do not need a Google account, a cloudHQ account, a plug-in, or any client software; they just click and download.

It is one of the few sharing tools that simultaneously satisfies the convenience demands of the sender, the no-signup expectations of the recipient, and the compliance demands of security, legal, and audit teams. And all that at a price that is a small fraction of enterprise data-loss-prevention or secure-file-transfer products.

We provide a free trial of Secure Document Sharing. The trial is 30 days with unlimited use. No credit card required to start the trial.

Use this direct link to purchase or upgrade to the paid Secure Document Sharing by cloudHQ plan from cloudHQ: Upgrade Secure Document Sharing: Upgrade Secure Document Sharing

Follow these troubleshooting steps for Google Chrome extensions: How to troubleshoot Google Chrome extensions. This should fix the issue. This should fix the issue. If it still does not work, please email us at support@cloudhq.net with a detailed description of the problem.

You create a password-protected share link directly from your Gmail compose window. Click the Secure Share button in the compose toolbar, pick a file from your Google Drive, optionally set a password and an expiration date, and the link is inserted into your email as a styled “secure share” card. When the recipient opens the link, they land on a clean cloudHQ-hosted download page, enter the password if you set one, and the file is delivered. Every view, password attempt, and download is logged per visitor IP on a per-share audit dashboard, so you always know who opened your file and from where.

Your files stay in your Google Drive at all times. cloudHQ does not copy, mirror, archive, or warehouse your documents anywhere on our servers. When a recipient downloads a secure share, the file is streamed on demand directly from your Drive using the OAuth credentials you authorized and is not retained on cloudHQ servers afterwards. You can revoke our Google Drive access at any time from your Google Account security settings, and we never see, transmit, or store your Google password.

No. The download page do not require Google account. Recipients click the share link, enter the password if one is set, and the file downloads to their device. No Google account, no cloudHQ account, no plug-in, and no client software is required. It works in any modern browser on any phone, tablet, or computer.

Yes. When you create a secure share, you can pick from 1 day, 3 days, 7 days, 14 days, 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, 180 days, 1 year, or “never expires”. After the chosen expiration time passes, the link stops working automatically, even if the recipient still has the URL and the password. This is ideal for time-sensitive contracts, proposals, audit responses, M&A diligence packets, and confidential offers that should not stay reachable after a deadline.

Yes. Each secure share can be restricted by approximate geographic location, IP address range, or country. If a recipient tries to open the link from outside an allowed region, the download is automatically blocked and the attempt is captured in the audit log. This is critical for organizations subject to data-residency rules, regulated industries with cross-border data restrictions, internal-only document policies, or files that simply should never leave a specific country.

Open your Secure Document Sharing dashboard at https://www.cloudhq.net/main_secure_share and click the info icon next to the share you want to review. The per-IP audit page shows the visitor’s IP address, approximate geographic location, the date and time of each interaction, and the operation performed — view, password attempt, password success, download, or spam report; along with any email or note the visitor left behind. Each unique visitor IP gets its own grouped row, so you can tell at a glance whether your file was opened once or fifty times and whether the same person came back later.

Yes. When composing a new email, click the Secure Share button in the Gmail compose toolbar and choose “Insert Existing Secure Share” to pick from secure shares you already created. The same URL can be embedded in as many emails as you want, and every visitor’s activity rolls up under a single share’s audit dashboard. There is no need to maintain a spreadsheet of share URLs on the side.

Yes. From your dashboard you can pause, resume, or delete any secure share at any time. A paused or deleted share stops serving the file immediately, even if the recipient still has the URL and the password. You can also reopen a paused share later if you change your mind, without changing the URL. This makes it easy to cut access the moment you suspect a leak, a forwarded link, or simply once a deal is closed and the file no longer needs to be available.

There is no practical file size limit imposed by Secure Document Sharing. Because files are streamed on demand directly from your Google Drive, the effective limit is your Google Drive storage quota and your network bandwidth. Whether you are sharing a 1 KB signed contract or a 5 GB media archive, the recipient experience is identical: open the link, enter the password, download.

Yes. The file picker shows both your personal Google Drive and any Shared Drives (Team Drives) you have access to. Files in a Shared Drive can be wrapped in a secure share in exactly the same way as personal-Drive files. The password protection, expiration controls, geographic restrictions, and per-IP audit log all work identically regardless of where the file lives in Drive.

Yes, you can fully brand the page recipients see when they open one of your secure shares — with your own logo, header text, header color, text color, page background color, and an option to hide the cloudHQ backlink (on paid plans). To set it up, go to your Secure Document Sharing dashboard at https://www.cloudhq.net/main_secure_share and click the Personalize Share Page button. The same branding applies to every share you create, so the experience is consistent across all of your recipients and reinforces your own brand rather than cloudHQ’s.

A standard Google Drive share link is a single secret. So anyone who has the URL can open the file, and that URL is trivially forwardable. Once you paste it into an email, the link can be auto-saved by mail clients, indexed in browser history, cached by URL-preview bots, accidentally pasted into chat tools, archived by mail backups, or quietly forwarded to a third party; and you have no way of knowing any of it happened. Layering a password on top of the URL creates a second factor that does not travel with the link: even if the URL is leaked or forwarded, the file remains inaccessible without the password, which the sender can deliver out of band (a phone call, a separate channel, an in-person handoff). For sensitive material such as contracts, financial statements, medical records, HR documents, legal filings, M&A diligence packets, password protection is the difference between “this file is shared with my recipient” and “this file is shared with everyone who happens to see the URL”. Regulations like HIPAA, GDPR, SOX, PCI-DSS, and ISO 27001 effectively require some form of access control beyond a public link for confidential data, and a vanilla share-and-pray Drive URL does not meet that bar. Secure Document Sharing makes adding that second factor a one-click operation on every share, so layered access control becomes the default rather than the exception.

Without download tracking, you have no way of knowing whether a sensitive document actually reached the right person, whether it was opened from an expected location, or whether the same link was quietly accessed by an unauthorized party. That is not just a usability gap — it is a security and compliance gap. A per-recipient audit log lets you answer the questions that every security review, internal-audit cycle, and breach investigation eventually asks: who opened this file, when, from which IP address, from which approximate location, and how many times? If a contract was supposed to be reviewed by one external counsel and the audit shows downloads from three different IP addresses in two different countries, you have an incident to investigate before the data leaks further. Compliance frameworks such as HIPAA (audit controls under 45 CFR §164.312), GDPR (records-of-processing under Article 30), SOX (internal control over financial reporting), and ISO 27001 all expect organizations to maintain an authoritative record of who accessed regulated data. A regular Google Drive share gives you essentially nothing on this dimension — at best you see view counts in the file’s revision history, and only if recipients are signed in to Google. Secure Document Sharing instead captures every interaction at the share level, indexed by visitor IP, regardless of whether the recipient is signed in to anything, and presents it as a clean per-share audit trail you can hand to auditors or attach to an incident report.

A regular Google Drive share is a one-way grant that you cannot really take back. The link is forwardable, has no expiration, no password, gives the sender no visibility into who downloaded the file, and offers no per-IP audit log. Once you click “Share with anyone who has the link”, you have effectively put a copy of the file into the wild — and your only options later are “keep the link alive forever” or “kill the entire share”. Secure Document Sharing narrows that to a controlled channel: the URL is unguessable, optionally password-protected, optionally restricted by geography or IP, optionally set to auto-expire on a deadline you choose, and every visit is recorded with the visitor’s IP, approximate location, timestamp, and operation performed. You can pause, resume, or revoke any share independently of your normal Drive sharing — without touching the file itself or its permissions. The file never leaves your Drive: at download time it is streamed on demand using your authorized credentials and is not retained on cloudHQ servers. The recipient gets a clean download page that requires no Google account, no plug-in, and no client software, while you keep an authoritative audit trail for every file you send.