Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

support.google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 295 posts

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

#191

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

erichurkman wrote: post #49
fpgaminer wrote: post #25

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 comp…

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.

> 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.

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

#193

Post by II2II »

jimmytidey wrote: post #66
xtracto wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Not really. There may be conflicting demands from customers that have to be dealt with, and conflicts between those customers and the realities of software development, but you generally need to offer the features that customers need to get their job done. In particularly bad cases, the failure to deliver may effectively dictate corporate and government policies. (Yes, I have lived through that.)

At a less dire level, it also affects the ability to acquire and retain customers. If a product does not offer the features a person needs or fails to reflect how they use it, the product becomes more trouble than it is worth. Compare Google's and Microsoft's office productivity applications. There are many things that you simply cannot do with Google's product that are addressed by Microsoft's product, or even in the often criticized LibreOffice.

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

#194

Post by askvictor »

fortran77 wrote: post #12
pedrocx486 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Did you tell him? Lots of good music from De bussy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Debussy

But daddy, why do you want to eat such a good composer?

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

#195

Post by qppo »

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).

Some services (eg GitHub) still make you pay even if you don't have to create a new account

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

#196

Post by qppo »

wolco wrote: post #135
mehrdada wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Who cares how much talent you have if nothing works. Perhaps they have too much talent and not enough meat and potatoes.

I mean they're printing money from their ad services so something must be working

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

#197

Post by aaron695 »

ezrast wrote: post #161
aaron695 wrote: post #121

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.

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.

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.

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

#198

Post by p1necone »

ramosu wrote: post #22

It seems Google simply abandon some of their products. I've been living with another issue since 2011: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/35889152

> It seems Google simply abandon some of their products.

This is the understatement of the century.

https://killedbygoogle.com/

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

#199

Post by Simulacra »

cbo100 wrote: post #109
BbzzbB wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's the same on the Apple discussion boards. You won't ever get an official answer, only a guess of an answer from somebody with no more knowledge than yourself. HP is the same, but occasionally you will get an employee answer, but it will be just as useless. My assumption is all the big tech companies don't want to give support away for free when you should be paying for a support contract for it. And yes, there is…

The Apple communities are next to useless, especially when it's a design flaw; butterfly keyboard. You practically have to sue companies like Apple to get them to take notice.

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

#200

Post by Simulacra »

neurostimulant wrote: post #108
xtracto wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Likely outsourced. Google doesn't seem to put much effort into any support mechanisms, so I would presume the same for technical support.
Post reply on HN