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

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

#141

Post by kstrauser »

techntoke wrote: post #118
kstrauser wrote: post #57

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 unusu…

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

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.

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

#142

Post by rrdharan »

arthurcolle wrote: post #138
SanchoPanda wrote: post #11

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

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…

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

See also "lifetime passes".

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

#143

Post by aspenmayer »

oh_sigh wrote: post #98
Simulacra wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I’m sorry I cannot do that, for me that would be doxxing. I work for a government contractor and have access to a databases of executive contact information. I think if you spent a little time with a search engine you might be able to accomplish the same thing otherwise.

So you used your database to look up information to intentionally share files with an unwilling party? Interesting.

If they didn’t want files to be shared with them, Google employees are empowered to fix this in ways non-employees are not. If they show up in the share list, one can only presume they consented to this, as there is a way to opt-out; there should be a menu to configure this setting as well, and that is a good point to make, but it is a different, related point.

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

#144

Post by makecheck »

SanchoPanda wrote: post #11

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

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.

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

#145

Post by amznthrwaway »

kstrauser wrote: post #87
cientifico wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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).

If a contractor isn't worth $10/month extra, solve the problem by ending the contract.

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

#146

Post by userbinator »

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.

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

#147

Post by ridaj »

prepend wrote: post #89
perennate wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 th…

I'm not sure what leads you to believe that the forum feedback isn't taken in consideration. My guess is that it is, but that there are about two dozen other things of similar importance and the team can only knock so many of them off.

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

#148

Post by wolco »

kstrauser wrote: post #87
cientifico wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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).

ftp folder for each.

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

#149

Post by wincy »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #99
prepend wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

I’m surprised Google hasn’t hopped-on to the UserVoice bandwagon like Microsoft and Adobe did.

Yeah it’s so cool how Microsoft Teams hasn’t implemented custom emojis. Had to write a script to pull all our Slack ones down since we’re being mandated to switch over.

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

#150

Post by pavel_lishin »

mehrdada wrote: post #112
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't think it is as simple as a singular person or a single room saying "I don't give a shit". It's a matter of prioritization. (In this particular case, even from a UX perspective alone, you could argue that increasing friction in sharing could net-net hurt the average user.) I don't think Google (if we can anthropomorphize it at all) is blind to this general phenomenon though--it's a trade-off you have to make a…

> Is it better for you to invest resources into incremental improvements to polish the final 2% or try again and maybe make a breakthrough.

I would argue that maybe they should try Option 1, instead of sunsetting their Nth chat app, or migrating everyone from Google Music (which would very much benefit from some polish) onto Google Youtube Music (which I don't understand the value of for me as a listener.)

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