[HN Gopher] Google Drive - How do I stop others from sharing fil...
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Google Drive - How do I stop others from sharing files with me?
Author : mariocesar
Score : 156 points
Date : 2020-07-27 21:11 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (support.google.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (support.google.com)
| schoolornot wrote:
| Tangential to this is that calendar/invite spam continues to be
| an issue as well. Want to trick someone into visiting a URL? Just
| send them a calendar invite and chances are they will click it.
| mariocesar wrote:
| Yes! they are still there.
| aahhahahaaa wrote:
| What drives me crazy is that this will happen even if the email
| with the invite never hits your inbox and goes straight to
| spam. Outright insane to not patch that ASAP.
| Simulacra wrote:
| https://twitter.com/GeorgeResch/status/1041459084636119040
| IOT_Apprentice wrote:
| I'll tweet Jeff Dean and see what happens.
| ausjke wrote:
| it's also pretty a bad user experience when you do have a shared
| link and you want to make a copy(in case the source is deleted),
| you can't copy the directory, you have to create a new directory
| and copy those files instead, if your shared link has quite a few
| sub-folders, you need spend quite a while to do that manual copy.
| ProAm wrote:
| Didn't google just make everyone jump through hoops on Youtube to
| ensure all content was safe for children because of COPPA? Does
| this violate that new law?
| ibdf wrote:
| I used to have everything google but have slowly moved away from
| their products because of this exact issue, because of a similar
| issue with the calendar invites, and because they just abandon
| their products. What's the point of releasing a brand new product
| and then releasing no updates? As a developer I love to try new
| software, but as a regular consumer I just need things to be
| reliable.
| partiallypro wrote:
| Is it possible that someone could share files with someone that
| is elicit content in order to get them in trouble or to target
| children's accounts? Seems...like a problem.
| agundy wrote:
| This can be so confusing for non-tech literate people too. My
| mother asked me to help her, saying she was hacked because there
| was porn in her Google Drive.
|
| It can be really difficult for non-power users to even understand
| why this is happening or what to do to fix this.
| ethbro wrote:
| That's more of the fault of Google Drive UI being terrible and
| failing to differentiate mine / shared / someone else's.
| SanchoPanda wrote:
| The mods on the support forums who make it sound like basic
| functionality missing from their product is your own fault for
| not submitting some kind of ticket deserve the gaslighting prize
| of the year for each of the last 5 years.
|
| They don't even have an option to show you how much space folders
| take up, when they charge you based on space usage.
|
| https://support.google.com/drive/thread/3970069?hl=en
| mcny wrote:
| > They don't even have an option to show you how much space
| folders take up, when they charge you based on space usage.
|
| iirc unlike Dropbox, files shared with you do not count against
| your quota on Google Drive as long as you don't add it to your
| drive.
| 1-6 wrote:
| That sounds like a great way to extend storage beyond the
| limit!
| techntoke wrote:
| How so? someone has to share the files first and there is a
| quota on the amount of times a shared file can be accessed.
| varjag wrote:
| Just shows how little talent there really is at Google.
| Everyone who can code are now on the doodle team.
| TheRealNGenius wrote:
| I know people are down voting you, but I just want to say
| that I found this comment funny.
| [deleted]
| neutronman wrote:
| Keeping an operation like Google going forward at that scale
| going is not a job for talentless hacks,
| huffmsa wrote:
| If the initial systems were written well, it could be self
| sustaining enough that it could run with an incompetent
| staff for quite a while.
| NotSammyHagar wrote:
| How about humorless hacks? ;-) I used to work at google
| too, it was fun. I heard they don't do the memegen TGIF (or
| Thursday) variants anymore.
| varjag wrote:
| ...but closing the UX tickets apparently is.
| obidan wrote:
| I mean, no it isn't.
|
| At the same time, an operation which works like this is
| certainly extremely flawed. I doubt there's one engineer
| working on GDrive that doesn't think a folder size feature
| wouldn't be useful and relatively simple to implement. So
| that's more of an argument towards the operation going bad,
| instead of the engineers.
|
| Maybe this slipped through the cracks but this thread
| already contains a bunch of examples of stuff like this
| happening.
|
| They can be architecting Tensorflow really well and that
| certainly is impressive but when GMail takes 3 seconds to
| load the main page and downloads 10MB during that process
| you know something is going wrong.
| knolan wrote:
| This reminds me of the obnoxious know-it-all that lives under
| the bridge on the QNAP forums.
| perennate wrote:
| When I read the recommended response in thread you linked, I
| just feel like they're acknowledging the feature doesn't exist
| and suggesting to use Send Feedback as a potential avenue to
| increase the chance that the feature gets implemented. It may
| be that important features are missing, but I don't think the
| forum mods can do anything about that and the reply didn't seem
| rude to me.
| xtracto wrote:
| Google support forums are terrible. Every time there is a
| missing feature (I usually find it in Google Spreadsheet) or a
| bug, the corresponding entry in the support forum would be
| answered with some pretext of why said feature will never be
| supported.
| jimmytidey wrote:
| Isn't being strict about what features you add the core of
| good product management? (Doesn't apply to bugs I guess.)
|
| Explaining it to users is a nice bonus.
| mey wrote:
| Even better, they make it pretty impossible to manage your
| online storage of photos since they split it out of
| drive.google.com
| techntoke wrote:
| It isn't impossible, just not convenient like it used to be.
| What I do is sync a copy to my backup device, and use the web
| interface to download any collages or effects that it auto-
| generates.
|
| You can then use rclone to sync deletions, which uses their
| API.
| dawnerd wrote:
| little side question, whats with these support forums that almost
| never have real employees answering but have community 'support
| specialists' that never answer the question and only tell you to
| use the feedback forms but beg for props on their answers. I
| don't get it.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Don't be afraid to use that feedback form. You're not required
| to say nice things on it.
| moandcompany wrote:
| As a ______ also affected by this issue on my personal Gmail
| accounts, I've filed a feedback/request for this internally.
| nikanj wrote:
| The same way you get any customer service from Google: Get your
| post on the front page of HN. This is probably going to get fixed
| shockingly fast now.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Pretty sure this has hit the front page of HN before...
| cbm-vic-20 wrote:
| Answer: find the email address of the person the product manager
| of Google Drive reports to, and start sharing stuff with them.
|
| (/s: not condoning doxxing here)
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| The sad reality is that this is the only way to ever get
| anywhere with Google's seemingly build it then abandon it
| services. You build something to move up the ladder while
| someone else is tossed at your ladder that is on its way
| crashing down at varying speeds.
|
| Now they embrace, extend, extinguish, and sometimes just shut
| it down cause it's not being marketed for a price at all.
| WatchDog wrote:
| More likely for your google account to get suspended than for
| them to make a product change.
| [deleted]
| warpech wrote:
| What's your technique of finding the name of a relevant product
| manager?
| neutronman wrote:
| Ask someone you know at Google who is high enough up to make
| an intro.
| Overtonwindow wrote:
| Genius!
| mehrdada wrote:
| LOL, you're assuming anyone gets promoted by fixing issues at
| Google. Wrong. You build some new shit and switch teams.
| Someone pitches a new project and builds from scratch. Rinse
| and repeat.
|
| This particular issue happens (at least that's my recollection
| a few years ago) frequently enough at Google that there were
| memes about it internally. Not sure giving additional feedback
| would help.
| Simulacra wrote:
| I just tried this. Let's see what happens.
| dakiol wrote:
| Please share the email address (use a throwaway account) so
| that everyone can do it as well. Otherwise it's pointless.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Bonus points for slipping your resume past the HR filters this
| way.
| mariocesar wrote:
| Just a simple option like "Allow just my contacts to share files
| with me". I lost so much time with all the spam and malware that
| is being sent to me just because my gmail account is so public
| ... :(
| techsupporter wrote:
| Spammers, scammers, and marketers are abusing every possible
| system to get eyeballs and it's moved beyond frustrating.
|
| I've had to dump phone numbers due to SMS, voicemail, and phone
| call spam. My spam box on my e-mail address (not hosted at
| Google, but still) is littered with bogus calendar invites,
| fake invoices, file sharing attempts, and so on.
|
| I'm a little surprised spammers aren't putting ad messages in
| fields that get logged in HTTP access logs just so admins will
| trip over them somehow.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Well there is spamming build logs. If you have used npm
| enough, you've probably seen someone asking for a job when
| you run npm i.
|
| This spam is possible from the console.log output of npm
| packages as they get installed.
| boxingdog wrote:
| they do something similar called ref spam.
| cesarb wrote:
| > I'm a little surprised spammers aren't putting ad messages
| in fields that get logged in HTTP access logs just so admins
| will trip over them somehow.
|
| It's been a long time since I last had reason to look at an
| Apache access.log file, but Referer spam used to be very
| common (IIRC, the default Apache access.log format logs the
| content of the Referer header, and analytics reports based on
| these logs often showed these as live links; it was not rare
| for these analytics reports to be publicly visible, so these
| Referer links could be used to spam the Google index).
| fortran77 wrote:
| "referrer" spam has been a thing for a long time!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referrer_spam
| joking wrote:
| They do, I have seen referred field spam, which also appears
| on analytics suites.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > Keep getting spam shared on an account I don't use much, but
| keep getting notifications. Not fun when my 9 yo son is on my
| phone and a notification pops up that someone shared "eat my
| pussy baby". Google needs to address this.
|
| Oh. That's bad.
| pedrocx486 wrote:
| Oh god. I got COMPLETELY derailed by this last month. My
| girlfriend's son was using my tablet (which is logged on my
| main Google account) and recently I was being victim of this,
| and suddenly he asked me "what's a bussy?"
|
| I never logged my account out of an device so fast. Google
| needs to fix this crap.
| fortran77 wrote:
| Did you tell him? Lots of good music from De bussy
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Debussy
| edoceo wrote:
| Classic parenting strategy here. Connect & Redirect. Well
| played.
| bgorman wrote:
| I have been getting documents with titles that seem like
| pornography shared with me recently as well. It is truly
| infuriating because I can't tell where they are coming from. It
| seems like this started around ~6 months ago. I think there is
| a report as spam option, but it doesn't seem to have stopped
| the onslaught.
| StanislavPetrov wrote:
| I stop it by not using Google in any capacity.
| ramosu wrote:
| It seems Google simply abandon some of their products.
|
| I've been living with another issue since 2011:
| https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/35889152
| crazygringo wrote:
| I'm not sure it makes sense to _disable_ this -- I can only
| imagine people forgetting they disabled it, then not
| understanding why they 're not getting a family member's folder
| of photos.
|
| And you can already remove something shared with you by going in
| Drive to "Shared With Me" and clicking "Remove" in the context
| menu for the file/folder.
|
| Otherwise, sharing something with a Google account is no
| different from sending an e-mail, e-mailing a Calendar invite,
| etc. After all, you can't turn off receiving e-mails or calendar
| invites.
|
| But, like Gmail, what Drive _should_ have is the ability to block
| specific sharers.
|
| In the meantime, you can use the "Report abuse/copyright" menu
| item on any shared item, although I don't know if that helps. :(
| figgyc wrote:
| I mean usually people tend to send a message or email alongside
| sharing files with people so I doubt it would be much of a
| loss.
| philsnow wrote:
| > But, like Gmail, what Drive should have is the ability to
| block specific sharers.
|
| It should have the ability to only accept document shares from
| people in your google contacts / in your organization.
| kstrauser wrote:
| My adventures last week:
|
| Question: We have a G Suite Enterprise account. We used to share
| documents with a contractor. They no longer contract with us. How
| do we remove that contractor from every shared document.
|
| Answer 1: Run this report to get a list of every document shared
| with them. Manually visit each document and un-share it.
|
| Answer 2: Our API docs are at...
|
| FFS, Google. I really don't think this is that unusual of a
| request. I refuse to believe that we're the first company ever
| that wanted to remove people from our Google Drive. Why do you
| make it so difficult?
| cientifico wrote:
| Solution we found back in the days. Create a new user, and give
| user name and password to the contractor. This might force to
| disable 2fa.
| JamesBaxter wrote:
| It's amazing how spammers will use every single vector to send
| stuff to us. I suppose if the cost of sending it is so low they
| have nothing to lose even when the take up is very low.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Not only that but a new vector is like a gold rush. It's a
| virus infected a new host that hasn't developed an immune
| response.
|
| A new vector (probably) hasn't built hardness yet against spam,
| like for example email with apps like Gmail filtering out most
| spam and SPF etc.
|
| If you start a forum, you expect spam, and there will be tools
| in the forum software to deal with it. But something new that
| isn't a traditional place to spam may be caught off guard.
| aahhahahaaa wrote:
| Yeah you have to assume that if a user can input anything,
| someone will use it to spam. Text, photos, video, audio...
| literally any form of user input.
| aahhahahaaa wrote:
| Right, they can send millions at very little cost... and in
| some places throughout the world a single successful scam could
| be equivalent to the average annual income.
| kwijibob wrote:
| I'm all in on GDrive - my whole world is in there. 25 years of
| files.
|
| I do notice Spam occasionally in the 'shared with me' menu - but
| it seems to get cleaned up.
|
| I already have all 99% notifications turned off in apps.
|
| Sounds like the real annoying part is getting the notification
| with the spammy sexual titles.
|
| If you didn't get notifications then likely the spam detection
| would delete before you ever noticed it in your 'Shared with Me'
| menu.
|
| Android needs to default to opt-in notifications like on IOS.
| fpgaminer wrote:
| Related to this bug, some time ago I started getting spam on my
| Google Calendar. Not sure if Google ever fixed it, but basically
| Google would automatically add events to your calendar when you
| got an invite in your email. Honestly, it's a nice feature; saves
| a couple clicks every time I get an invite. The bug is that it
| applied even if the email was spam. There was no workaround,
| other than disabling the feature completely. Quite a pain. And
| yes, just like this bug, you'd get lovely "eat my pussy" events
| popping up on your calendar and reminders.
|
| Thanks Google, you're the best /s
| mjayhn wrote:
| This hit a bunch of us about a year ago, maybe two years, I
| forget. It was incredibly annoying and made me completely stop
| relying on gmail for calendar stuff.
| dmurray wrote:
| I used to get these in Russian (I don't speak Russian and have
| no links with Russia). The worst part was I couldn't delete
| them from the Android app, which is like probably everyone else
| the only place I ever see my Google calendar. The functionality
| to delete them was hidden at calendar.google.com or somewhere
| I'd never had occasion to use. I don't get this spam any more,
| so I guess Google fixed it at some level.
| malwarebytess wrote:
| I still get this. It was bad enough on my "sign up for shit"
| email address that I had to disconnect that account from my
| smartphone because it kept spamming me with notifications in my
| calendar to "earn $1500 a week working at home!"
| 4kevinking wrote:
| I'm actually getting this spam now (started a couple months
| ago). Would love advice on how to get rid of it!
| fpgaminer wrote:
| I think this is the guide I used awhile back to disable the
| feature: https://lifehacker.com/how-to-keep-spam-out-of-your-
| google-c...
| aahhahahaaa wrote:
| They have not fixed it.
|
| I wish I could turn off the feature entirely, but I still
| occasionally get Russian spam events on my calendar. They also
| try to notify me at ~3am (fortunately I turn notifications
| completely off at night).
|
| The emails themselves land in my spam folder... but no one said
| "hey, maybe calendar events shouldn't be created from the spam
| folder" at inception, so I guess it'll never be implemented.
|
| I report them as spam when I get them, but I also discovered
| that I can't report calendar events as spam in the mobile app.
| fpgaminer wrote:
| If it's any help, I _think_ this is the guide I used to
| disable the feature: https://lifehacker.com/how-to-keep-spam-
| out-of-your-google-c...
|
| It was awhile ago, but that looks like the right link and
| jives with my current settings. I don't get any more spam on
| my calendar, but obviously need to manually respond Yes to
| any email invites to get them to show on the calendar.
| erichurkman wrote:
| It's used not just by spammers, but by sales reps, too.
|
| Dell recently did this to about half a dozen people on my team.
| 'Q2 Budget Review', which sounds official, but is really a Dell
| rep trying to sell you junk that magically pops up on your
| calendar _even if you mark their message as spam_.
|
| Dirty way to get by executive assistants, too.
| kstrauser wrote:
| That sounds like an excellent way to make me ban all inbound
| traffic from that vendor.
| cpach wrote:
| I've been pondering migrating away from Dropbox. I guess I won't
| migrate to Google Drive then.
| foobiekr wrote:
| Where are you migrating to?
|
| Dropbox's new client is absolutely terrible - an in-your-face
| resource hog trying to upsell constantly. But from a
| reliability perspective, Dropbox is absolutely great as long as
| you don't let it trick you into enabling their automatic
| offloading "feature" (hello corrupt all-NUL files!).
|
| But of the main choices, the quality/reliability ordering
| really is: dropbox, icloud drive, one drive, anything else and
| then google drive. So I'd like a good alternative to DB that is
| at least as good as icloud drive (which is not a high bar).
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(page generated 2020-07-27 23:00 UTC)