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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?

#221

Post by na85 »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #215
Simulacra wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> It boggles the mind why a sales person would do something that is likely to be seen as an invasion to the prospect. Sales droids don't think the same way regular people do. A lot of them really believe everybody is as extroverted as they are and introverts are just pretending. And that everybody would be as excited about their product as they are, if they only knew about it. The best sales people can adopt the poin…

You're equating duplicity with extraversion. That's not the same thing.

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

#222

Post by techslave »

manigandham wrote: post #130
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…

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 control…

> 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’.

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

#223

Post by hoistbypetard »

semireg wrote: post #172
cbo100 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Maybe Apple consumer forums, but I’ve had amazing support from the developer forums. Especially Quinn “the Eskimo” ... saves my butt every 6 months it seems, and isn’t the least bit offended when my questions relate to an opaque electron code signing issue. Seriously, bless this person for doing the “lord’s work.”

He's been doing it since the late 90s too... I still remember getting an answer from him regarding a dusty corner of the Mac OS 8 internet config API when I was trying to bulk provision Macs for campus internet access in 1998. It was all mailing lists then.

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

#224

Post by jennyyang »

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.

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

#225

Post by Dylan16807 »

na85 wrote: post #221
dreamcompiler wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It boggles the mind why a sales person would do something that is likely to be seen as an invasion to the prospect. Sales droids don't think the same way regular people do. A lot of them really believe everybody is as extroverted as they are and introverts are just pretending. And that everybody would be as excited about their product as they are, if they only knew about it. The best sales people can adopt the poin…

You're equating duplicity with extraversion. That's not the same thing.

The post says "and", not "therefore".

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

#226

Post by ridaj »

prepend wrote: post #203
ridaj wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Good point, I’m assuming because the only advice given by mods is to submit feedback. I’ve never seen “I agree, this is important, I’ll work with the dev team.” I think that if there was consideration, that would be in the mods scripts and posted on the forum. I understand it’s hard to prioritize features but I’m familiar with so many years old common sense suggestions that don’t have any explanation of why it won’t…

The mod in this situation isn't an employee, it looks like. Just a user doing their best to help other users, so directing to the feedback tool sounds reasonable to me...

Maybe an employee could chime in. The problem I've seen with responding "I'll work with the dev team" is that some users at least will then have some timeframe expectations on the order of weeks based on what they imagine a fix to look like. But they don't really have a good idea of the system complexity, and realistically, these kinds of issues can linger for years because either it turns out most users actually care about other issues more, or the business needs to focus on making money, or some other complication shows up; and people end up being disappointed more often than not. I think it's unfortunately better, in this realm, not to say anything until you have the fix implemented, tested, and ready to roll out.

All the free online services that I can think of have this kind of annoying issue that advanced users run into. (And unfortunately the paid ones often have that kind of issue too, but at least they have much more reason to be responsive to support calls.)

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

#227

Post by gjs278 »

WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #191
erichurkman wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

ok... and you know it wasn’t a breech. anyone you explained it to would understand it was a sales rep taking advantage of a bug. you’d sound a little off.

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

#228

Post by asveikau »

neutronman wrote: post #39
varjag wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just shows how little talent there really is at Google. Everyone who can code are now on the doodle team.

Keeping an operation like Google going forward at that scale going is not a job for talentless hacks,

That's why they hire thousands of talentless hacks, at scale.

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

#229

Post by jiggawatts »

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…

Big-vendor hardware: Sure it costs 1.5-2.0x as much as white-box equipment, but you're paying for the support!

... later...

"Can I get that support that I paid double for?"

"Oh no, for that you need enterprise support, that's extra!"

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

#230

Post by dahart »

techslave wrote: post #222
manigandham wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 control…

> 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 name…

> folders don’t actually exist in google drive. files are shared individually.

What do you mean? Drive has UI for folders, shows folders hierarchically, and allow sharing of folders with a single dialog-box interaction. There are instructions online that explain how to use folders for organizing and sharing:

https://support.google.com/drive/answer/2375091

https://support.google.com/drive/answer/7166529

For a software engineer, it may help to understand how folders are implemented when dealing with tricky ACL situations, but for all practical purposes, and for the majority of (non-engineer) users, folders definitely exist in Drive.

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