Google Drive – How do I stop others from sharing files with me?

https://support.google.com/drive/thread/3708017?hl=en

by mariocesar • 6 years ago

476 274 6 years ago

support.google.com

mariocesar2• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

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.

cesarb• 6 years ago

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).

fortran772• 6 years ago

"referrer" spam has been a thing for a long time!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referrer_spam

joking• 6 years ago

They do, I have seen referred field spam, which also appears on analytics suites.

quickthrower23• 6 years ago

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.

cbm-vic-20• 6 years ago

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)

Overtonwindow• 6 years ago

Genius!

Simulacra11• 6 years ago

I just tried this. Let's see what happens.

dakiol2• 6 years ago

Please share the email address (use a throwaway account) so that everyone can do it as well. Otherwise it's pointless.

giancarlostoro• 6 years ago

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.

warpech• 6 years ago

What's your technique of finding the name of a relevant product manager?

neutronman• 6 years ago

Ask someone you know at Google who is high enough up to make an intro.

ridaj3• 6 years ago

mehrdada5• 6 years ago

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.

hn_throwaway_992• 6 years ago

This is so glaringly apparent as a user. I think Google makes some fantastic products, but the number of "This has to be so exceedingly easy to fix, but Google just doesn't give a damn" issues I've hit is crazy.

Here's one simple one: the number of volume steps in Android is only 16: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/37035441 . This means that the difference between off and the lowest level volume can be pretty big if you're trying to be quiet, e.g. avoid waking someone in the same room. I almost wish they would just close issues with a "We don't give a shit" resolution status.

29athrowaway• 6 years ago

Many organizations work like this. People get credit for orphaned projects they no longer work on.

Then, more responsible developers have to waste their lives maintaining code that was designed to be orphaned from the start.

UncleMeat• 6 years ago

Googler here promoted twice by taking over a team/project, simplifying it, and making it hum.

This is a common narrative about Google. There is some truth to it but the blanket "nobody gives a shit about anything other than launches" claim is bogus.

phendrenad22• 6 years ago

Bonus points for slipping your resume past the HR filters this way.

WatchDog• 6 years ago

More likely for your google account to get suspended than for them to make a product change.

hmmdar• 6 years ago

Did you ever see the time where spammers could share calendar invites with you that would automatically get applied to your calendar without you accepting it...

Google eventually added an option to change this behavior. Guess it will take a critical mass of complaints to get something similar for Google Drive.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/google-calendar-spam-is-on-the-...

kohtatsu• 6 years ago

I thought this would be years old but this article was written late August 2019.

iCloud had a similar problem in 2016.

tornato7• 6 years ago

That won't work, you should find whoever the product manager responsible for Google Drive sharing is, and start sharing files with them.

Wowfunhappy• 6 years ago

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.

pedrocx4862• 6 years ago

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.

fortran772• 6 years ago

Did you tell him? Lots of good music from De bussy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Debussy

bgorman• 6 years ago

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.

ergocoder• 6 years ago

I remember when Google's facial recognized black people as gorillas.

They fixed it very quickly.

Showing "eat my pussy baby" to a young kid is obviously not as bad. /s

schoolornot• 6 years ago

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.

mariocesar2• 6 years ago

Yes! they are still there.

Simulacra11• 6 years ago

https://twitter.com/GeorgeResch/status/1041459084636119040

aahhahahaaa5• 6 years ago

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.

agundy• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

That's more of the fault of Google Drive UI being terrible and failing to differentiate mine / shared / someone else's.

superkuh2• 6 years ago

differentiate mine / shared / someone else's

They're all Google's.

SanchoPanda• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

That sounds like a great way to extend storage beyond the limit!

xtracto• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

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.

BbzzbB• 6 years ago

This is off topic but it reminds me, every time I look for some Windows 10 problem, it mostly leads to some Microsoft forum (answers.microsoft.com). In there however, the questions systematically get answered by a billion "MSFT specialist consultants #not working for MSFT", and it always weirds me out. Are these people there for self promotion, for the thrill of it or is it MSFT that has some reward system for third parties to participate? I know helpful strangers is nothing new to the internet, I guess I'm just weirded out because there's never an official answer on MSFT's official forum and these sorts of questions are not really the sort of "playful" puzzles one might encounter helping strangers on SO/Reddit/Discord.

neurostimulant3• 6 years ago

Are the people that answering questions on that support forum actually google employees? I got this impression that google employees never post on that forum and the people that answer are just unpaid forum members which somehow take it upon themselves to post answers.

mlthoughts2018• 6 years ago

Google products are more likely to be suddenly deprecated with no offboarding plan than to care what features an overwhelming majority of customers want.

Most Google products exist solely for the benefit of the Google engineers who use them for resume padding & career growth. They lose money for Google the company and they infuriate loyal customers up until they are capriciously surprise decommissioned.

mey• 6 years ago

Even better, they make it pretty impossible to manage your online storage of photos since they split it out of drive.google.com

techntoke8• 6 years ago

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.

pottertheotter• 6 years ago

What do you mean by that? I'm curious because I switched to Google Drive after Dropbox discontinued any real photo support a few years back. I like Dropbox more for file syncing, but put up with Google Drive's weaknesses because I get much better photo management.

wakkaflokka• 6 years ago

This move frustrated me to no end. Makes backing up my Google Photos that much more of a PITA because you have to use Takeout, which isn't straightforward - if you have a large library, you manually have to download 50+ zip files and "auto download" extensions don't seem to work with the Takeout interface last time I tried.

knolan3• 6 years ago

This reminds me of the obnoxious know-it-all that lives under the bridge on the QNAP forums.

cyclotron3k• 6 years ago

I know exactly who you're referring to

aspenmayer3• 6 years ago

Do you like QNAP products? I have experience with a few Synology NASes, and was looking at QNAP’s media center NAS products, and they seem nice. It seems like QNAP has a bit more open source support, which I definitely like. Ubuntu Linux Station looks neat, like a first-party supported integrated Ubuntu Docker container? That QNAP’s web management and the device itself runs Linux under the hood is awesome; this may be the case as well with Synology products, so I don’t mean to draw a comparison where there is none.

Anyway, any recommendations for QNAP gear?

perennate• 6 years ago

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.

Simulacra11• 6 years ago

This could be because Google may outsource everything, especially their customer service, and so you’re essentially communicating with a call center in another country that has no incentive to be nice.

prepend3• 6 years ago

That’s a failure on Google’s part. If feedback forum mods can’t also influence the roadmap, that’s a missed opportunity.

Even if it’s as simple as having 50 votes on the bug tracker, there should be some way for forum mods to synthesize and share feedback to the dev team for what to build.

I personally hate how there’s never a feedback loop on these posts noting how a change was made. Microsoft is pretty bad about this too.

“Please submit a suggestion” is a really unsatisfying experience to a user. Especially for really basic functions. Especially when not implementing makes the company money.

throwawaysea• 6 years ago

Apple forums are also like this. There are a bunch of Apple apologists full of zeal, trivializing problems and giving people false workarounds.

arthurcolle• 6 years ago

Yeah I asked why I couldnt download old emails between when I started the Gmail Pro or whatever subscription and then subscription lapsed and the genius bootlickers on Support duty said "well its your fault for not continuing to pay, what do you expect?"

Of course the data is available to download if I pay, but my previous 2 years of payment didn't count. (mysterious)

Will literally never pay Google for anything ever again after that, its actually evil.

Compare that to the new service hey.com which claims you can download/export forever.

Fuck Google. Just bought a new MacBook Pro yesterday and I will never install or use any Google products on it ever.

rrdharan• 6 years ago

Forever is a very long time (and therefore a very bold claim for any SaaS app to make).

See also "lifetime passes".

Igelau• 6 years ago

genius bootlickers

I guffawed. I don't understand who thinks it's a good idea to have a bunch of clueless volunteer fanboys represent your first line of support. So many forums are like this though. Microsoft is especially polluted with it last I checked. It screams "so big we're officially completely out of touch".

makecheck• 6 years ago

Wasting space in Google products is comically easy too, because it’s so “integrated” that you can have crap everywhere and may or may not know how to get rid of it.

I tried uploading a title image to my YouTube channel, and somehow doing so created an entire Google Photos account (even though the channel image is not a photo!). I dragged-and-dropped several replacement images because the YouTube UI for layout preview/cropping is so terrible that I didn’t get it right the first few times. Except the images are not replaced, they’re added, and there is nothing in YouTube to delete them. You have to go into Google Photos, and several screens later “delete” your “photos” of useless uploads. Except they’re not deleted, they’re in the “Trash”; etc. etc.

These are basic things that wouldn’t be stupidly hard to do if anyone there had any power over, or concern with, the full flow of using their products.

48bb-9a7e-dc4f2• 6 years ago

It goes deeper. Last time I checked I found previous uploads or deleted images in two different Picasa interfaces, one had YouTube and profile related images, even wallpapers from Gmail. The other had some of my Google Photos. I don't have an account to confirm but it's probably still there.

StanislavPetrov• 6 years ago

I stop it by not using Google in any capacity.

ramosu• 6 years ago

It seems Google simply abandon some of their products.

I've been living with another issue since 2011: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/35889152

p1necone2• 6 years ago

It seems Google simply abandon some of their products.

This is the understatement of the century.

https://killedbygoogle.com/

jiggawatts2• 6 years ago

"9 years with this. This is beyond absurd and stupid. The way it is done now allows a complete stranger to fill my Firebase dashboard with 100 projects and I'm completely helpless. WTF"

Wow.

When people say that Google "doesn't seem to give a shit" about their users, this is what they mean.

JamesBaxter• 6 years ago

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.

quickthrower23• 6 years ago

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.

aahhahahaaa5• 6 years ago

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.

aahhahahaaa5• 6 years ago

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.

fpgaminer4• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

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.

4kevinking• 6 years ago

I'm actually getting this spam now (started a couple months ago). Would love advice on how to get rid of it!

fpgaminer4• 6 years ago

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...

phs318u• 6 years ago

Would love advice on how to get rid of it!

This will sound facetious, but I mean it sincerely. Change email provider. I was an original "invite only" user of GMail. Eventually, I got so sick of Google's complete u-turn on their original philosophy that I changed, despite the cost in time and effort that decision entailed. It's worth it. But I will recommend you choose providers carefully. If you're not paying for it in some way (e.g. Fastmail), be concerned. Also, the ability to use your own domain is a huge boon (you'll never have to go through the excessive email-change pain again).

aahhahahaaa5• 6 years ago

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.

fpgaminer4• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

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.

kstrauser9• 6 years ago

That sounds like an excellent way to make me ban all inbound traffic from that vendor.

pavel_lishin2• 6 years ago

It's used not just by spammers, but by sales reps, too.

Not sure there's a distinction there.

WrtCdEvrydy2• 6 years ago

Dell recently did this to about half a dozen people on my team. 'Q2 Budget Review',

If you put this shit on my calendar, I will never purchase a product from you. I will additionally, at my own discretion, use it as proof that you have had a data breach and are unable to keep your accounts safe since no real company would really do this on purpose.

Simulacra11• 6 years ago

We had someone try this at a company I worked at previously. The target was so angry they aggressively complained; the company fired the salesman. It boggles the mind why a sales person would do something that is likely to be seen as an invasion to the prospect.

malwarebytess2• 6 years ago

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!"

unnouinceput• 6 years ago

Considering 40h/week that would be 1500/40 = $35/h. Kinda low for a freelancer to work from home. Tell spammers their game is outdated, they should at least double it :P

wincy2• 6 years ago

You just reminded me why I decoupled my google calendar from my iPhone calendar a few years ago. Just the other day I was thinking I’d like them up, but something made me feel like I shouldn’t...

Simulacra11• 6 years ago

Google has very little incentive to fix the problem, and outsourced support personnel have even less incentive to care. The entire google forums read like passing the buck.

fpgaminer4• 6 years ago

Google has very little incentive to fix the problem

A long time ago, in an internet far, far away, Gmail was brand new. The big feature? No spam. Back then we'd hide our email addresses in cryptic text and images. It was a private thing, shared between friends. If the light of the internet were to ever shine upon your unobfuscated email address, woe be onto you as the plague of SPAM descended. There were even entire websites dedicate to the purpose of "email address images". It was ... a wild time.

Then, GMAIL! For the first time since the dawn of SPAM we could post our addresses in plaintext, in the light of day. We didn't hide them like dirty underwear. The whole WORLD could see our email addresses, and we didn't have a care in the world. The smell of fresh email was in the air, unbesmirched by SPAM.

Perhaps the young ones forget. Perhaps Google has forgotten. Lost to the sands of Calendar spam...

eximius• 6 years ago

Even internally this bug is not prioritized. In their defense, it's not clear what the behaviour should be. Against them, there are options that, while not perfect, are better than the status quo, even if the user must manually set them.

toss14• 6 years ago

Another lovely Google feature that lasted for about 10sec. after I discovered it:

Booked a flight, got the receipt through Gmail. Google then auto-populated my calendar with the flights - fine. They also populated it with a hotel reservation, and a link saying I hadn't yet confirmed the reservation for Hilton. I was going to stay with family, w/no intention of staying in a hotel. I couldn't believe the blatant hijacking and spamming involved here from my private info - bad enough if they'd merely spammed a hotel advert for those dates.

Contacted Google, no way to turn it off without turning off the entire feature. Done. Permanently.

I couldn't believe anyone could think this was a good idea.

scubbo• 6 years ago

YMMV, but I personally think that's a reasonable level of intrusion. I'd prefer less; but for the convenience of "auto-populated calendar events", I'm willing to swallow a little unobtrusive upselling for a very justifiable assumption ("person who is travelling _probably_ wants a hotel").

square_usual• 6 years ago

This must be fairly recent, because about a year ago I bought tickets, got a receipt in my gmail, and it didn't try to upsell me a hotel.

ethagnawl• 6 years ago

I'd been wondering about this phenomenon for years. However, it happened infrequently and was never enough of a bother to dig into.

cpach2• 6 years ago

I’ve been pondering migrating away from Dropbox. I guess I won’t migrate to Google Drive then.

foobiekr2• 6 years ago

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).

Simulacra11• 6 years ago

Following. I would very much like to find a cloud storage solution other than Google That could add a bit more functionality, security, and customization.

ben509• 6 years ago

Oh no... shades of RealPlayer.

benhurmarcel• 6 years ago

I've been using Nextcloud, I'm pretty happy with it. I got a managed instance at Hetzner, it's decently priced.

cpach2• 6 years ago

I’m not sure. I really liked Dropbox the way it was up until ~2018 or so. It did its job very well until they decided to bloat it... I think I’ll go with either iCloud (I mostly use macOS and iOS) or OneDrive.

kstrauser9• 6 years ago

Not affiliated in any way, but we've had good luck with Box.

pmarreck3• 6 years ago

I'm pretty happy with Google Drive (except for the unwanted filesharing "exploit") and have never liked Dropbox ever

IOT_Apprentice• 6 years ago

I'll tweet Jeff Dean and see what happens.

ProAm• 6 years ago

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?

partiallypro• 6 years ago

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.

viraptor• 6 years ago

Unless the process fails at multiple stages, no. The metadata for who owns a file is not hidden. It's pretty obvious that you get randomly shared a file from someone else. Then again, we've had cases where the process failed at multiple stages before...

dawnerd• 6 years ago

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.

kstrauser9• 6 years ago

Don't be afraid to use that feedback form. You're not required to say nice things on it.

komali2• 6 years ago

I've always wondered about this - who out there is simping hours of their time for Google, Microsoft etc day in day out? I guess I'm grateful for their existence when I find their 10 year old answer to some weird esoteric thing I'm doing that happens to have worked. But who are these people that are (I presume) working for free to fill in the lack of existence of Google support teams?

moandcompany• 6 years ago

As a ______ also affected by this issue on my personal Gmail accounts, I've filed a feedback/request for this internally.

nikanj• 6 years ago

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.

phendrenad22• 6 years ago

Pretty sure this has hit the front page of HN before...

crazygringo2• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

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.

crazygringo2• 6 years ago

I don't think that would be super-helpful. Even if you work in a corporation, you occasionally need to receive a shared file from a customer, outsourced team, etc., even if you don't plan on it. Then, debugging why you're not receiving shared files will be frustrating.

The problem here isn't people sharing things with you, the problem is abusive spam. So anti-spam tech (like blocking which is the most basic) is the right approach here, I think.

kstrauser9• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

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.

kstrauser9• 6 years ago

That would work to a point, but has its own issues (and also means that you have to pay for a company account for every contractor).

ghayes• 6 years ago

Our solution is to clone docs which we plan to share externally. Then, at least, it's a doc that has already been shared out, instead of docs that you continue to update.

techntoke8• 6 years ago

I'm not sure if you've seen this or not?

https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/52093/see-all-sh...

Generally, you would disable an account to revoke sharing. Are you sharing these outside your domain? That could be part of the problem. I agree there should be an easier way to remove sharing for everything for a particular user (and there may be). Have you checked out GAM?

https://github.com/jay0lee/GAM

kstrauser9• 6 years ago

Yep, we're sharing outside your domain, but that's a feature that they advertise and recommend. I've started to check GAM, but what should have been a chore in our sprint has quickly turned into a fullblown story. I'll have to find some time to waste figuring out how to do this thing that I can't believe Google doesn't have built in.

manigandham4• 6 years ago

It's recommended (and much easier) to share access to a folder instead of individual files. You can also use Google Groups instead of adding individual users. Google Team/Shared Drives has finally started to improve permissions and includes sharing with external emails as well.

Otherwise it's better to use something like Box.com which is actually designed for enterprise-level features including complex access controls and user management.

kstrauser9• 6 years ago

That might be true, but nowhere in the UI does it recommend that. If you want to share a file, nothing suggests you consider sharing a folder instead. And even then, we'd still have to find and disable all of the folders that had been shared with the ex-associate. That would reduce the number of items to un-share, but the fundamental problem of having no easy way to find and handle each item is still there.

Yeah, we're going to Box for everything outside our organization for exactly those reasons. If Google Drive lived up to the "enterprise" label they stick on accounts, we would stick with it. It's just not business-ready in its current form, though.

techslave• 6 years ago

It's recommended (and much easier) to share access to a folder instead of individual files.

It’s not. folders don’t actually exist in google drive. files are shared individually. there’s a very complex interaction between imaginary folder ACLs and file ACLs. if you depend on the folders as being hierarchical (which they aren’t), this will bite you through unexpected leftover sharing.

The exceptionally stupidly names Shared drives (used to be called Team Drives) fix this.

Otherwise, ‘gam’ is the best tool out there for managing this.

Some of the paid tools are like VPNs. you end up giving full access to the tool developer. be very careful if you go with a paid tool vs ‘gam’.

jfaat• 6 years ago

Shameless plug, but the product I'm currently working on does this: https://altitudenetworks.com/offboarding.html

You're definitely not the first company to want this!

toast02• 6 years ago

G Suite says Enterprise but doesn't actually do it.

For years, you had to turn of 2fa enforcement for the whole org, or do janky hacks with special groups and policy exceptions for groups to onboard new employees because they hadn't gotten around to a first time login flow that had a mandatory 2fa enrollment; instead they'd just prompt for the 2fa code you couldn't have setup.

There's no way to merge two separate G Suite accounts, in case your company merges with another company. You're just supposed to setup new users in the new org and close the old org account. Even more fun to be had if you want to keep the same usernames (I can't imagine the collosal pain it would be if you also wanted google handling the email during that transititon).

Oh yeah: there's no way to stop people from trying to setup consumer google accounts on your corporate domain. Most of those are spammers or idiots that won't get confirmed, but some of them are employees doing things wrong, and can confirm them, but then you have things like two accounts with the same name that are different because one is a g suite (but you can't register the domain for two different organizations, because three accounts with the same name would be too much)

kstrauser9• 6 years ago

For years, you had to turn of 2fa enforcement for the whole org, or do janky hacks with special groups and policy exceptions for groups to onboard new employees because they hadn't gotten around to a first time login flow that had a mandatory 2fa enrollment; instead they'd just prompt for the 2fa code you couldn't have setup.

That's still the case. We require 2FA, and 2FA setup on first login, but then you can't log in the first time because you don't have 2FA. We have a group we put new employees in so that they can set it up, then we remove them afterward.

kwijibob2• 6 years ago

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.

dmoose• 6 years ago

Given Google's track record this exhibits a level of faith I would find hard to muster. I really hope you still have the offline backups.

kwijibob2• 6 years ago

Well GSuite/Drive is a MAJOR Google product.

And they have great export via Google Takeout which I do regularly to some giant tarballs (and ironically put on my otherwise empty dropbox)

ausjke• 6 years ago

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.

ibdf• 6 years ago

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.

thisbrt• 6 years ago

IMHO Google drive is one of the worst service of Its kind in the market. Copying, moving duplicating files is as complex and blunt as it could be. Folder duplication doesn’t exist. I’m actually not surprised that sharing is still not fixed. Look at Meet. A service that only after being absolutely beaten by Zoom received some attention. They’re working on bringing Plus back in the form of Currents, but you still cannot stop people from sharing file with you in Google drive...

grawprog• 6 years ago

Oh, I was really hoping to see a solution to this. I've been getting an increasing amount of Goole drive spam to the point where every couple hours I'm clearing away notifications for some bullshit that's been shared with me. I haven't even used google drive for like 7 or 8 years.

aaron6952• 6 years ago

I don't think people here get this is a fundamental internet spam problem not solved with a button.

Any solution to this, should work equally well with email and vice versa.

ezrast• 6 years ago

Blocking shares from outside your organization would be a fine solution for the many folks who just use Google Drive for personal storage or team coordination. Inter-organization communication isn't a primary use case the way it is with email.

aaron6952• 6 years ago

It's a fair point and you are the customer.

But perhaps the way forward is, just as email pushed us ahead through massive interconnected communication, so is swapping files through massive interconnected communication. I'm sick of not being able to send digital artefacts > 25MB to people, and having corporate emails reject 15MB files.

Perhaps it's the next leap forward.

I think there's a good argument that's not the case, but I think there's an argument we should try it.

Allowing people to stop it, will kill the idea in it's tracks, so I understand why the Google Drive Team don't want to roll out a button. It's possibly a Google Drive killer, it's not what Google Drive is.

userbinator• 6 years ago

I suspect the reason this stands out is that we normally think of problems in the other direction: someone is able to access something you did not share. In this case, it's being able to access something someone else shared, which AFAIK would often be unsolicited anyway, so the scenario is more like spam than anything related to security.

scottmcdot• 6 years ago

Similar thing happens with spam calendar invites although I think Google have addressed that now.

tcmeggs• 6 years ago

Love that the only way to get support from Google in 2020 is to post to HN.

MaxBarraclough• 6 years ago

From Google's point of view, it probably works as quite an effective filter. If a Google issue has made it to the HN front-page, it's probably worth looking at.

Of course, this doesn't absolve them of the matter of it being the only way to get support.

rexreed• 6 years ago

I fail to be surprised anymore at the lack of what should be OBVIOUS functionality in some of the largest functionality systems.

Whenever i think I might be stupid for missing what should be obvious functionality I submit a ticket to only realize that the functionality not only doesn't exist but somehow my really basic suggestion is a "unique" or "profound" idea.

Honestly who is hiring these product managers? Who is coming up with these features? Why are what should be no-brainer obvious functionality items missing?

Is there something about product management and design I don't understand? Why is it that you can't get notifications on group calendars or background images on Google docs or lots of other things I'm forgetting now that at the time I was like "wow I can't believe you can't do that"

Jap2-0• 6 years ago

Another (similar) very irritating thing I've found with Drive is that while there is an option to remove a shared file from your drive (eg. if it's only listed because of link sharing), there are some that (seemingly at random) can't be un-shared.

shadowgovt• 6 years ago

Not fun when my 9 yo son is on my phone...

Well there's your first problem.

dzonga• 6 years ago

im a google one user. & will admit only pay, because it's a steal for the price. no other service offered 100gb for $20 a year.but yeah, google software quality is quite poor. wonder, why all those engineers doing leetcode interviews can't make quality products.

rnotaro• 6 years ago

I wish I could use my own domain with GOne.

I'm using GSuite for my private domain after having too much reputations / emails reaching spams issues.

Somehow it was getting worst over the years and 1+ of 10 emails were ending into spam. :(

jennyyang• 6 years ago

The only reason why this hasn't been fixed is because even with this bug, people continue to keep using the product. So why bother fixing it?

The only way to get Google to respond is to stop using their products. That's the only thing that matters to them.

llama90002• 6 years ago

I've never had the misfortune of having so many file sharings directed at my gmail, but if it happens to me this is what I'd do:

1) Create a filter to archive all file sharing messages + send to spam folder. You will have to check spam when you're expecting a file share later on though.

2) Turn off Gmail/GDrive notifications on your phone. I'd habitually check my mail regularly anyway. Someone wants me urgently could have a dozen other ways to ping me.

throwaway29102• 6 years ago

In the spirit of 2020, maybe making the problem worse will ultimately make it better?

Google Drive – How do I stop others from sharing files with me?

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