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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?

#251
post #26

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

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,…

Oh no... shades of RealPlayer.

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

#252
post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For every one person who vows to never purchase their product, 10 others become useful leads.

Yes, but for every person I tell that they had a data breach causing them to phish their customers through calendar, I can poison 50 people in each organization, then they can poison 50 and so forth... let's call it exponential growth of the DELL-20 coronavirus.

> Yes, but for every person I tell that they had a data breach causing them to phish their customers through calendar

The number of times I've managed to convince someone not to use a service because of data breaches or poor security settings is precisely 0.

If people are OK with banks and retirement accounts that follow poor security standards, they won't really care about Dell.

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

#253

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…

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.

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.

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

#254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That really hasn’t been my experience when working alongside sales people at the companies I’ve worked for. I'll outweigh your anecdote with mine, because the only two companies where I had to work with sales people, in both places the sales people were exactly as the parent described. One cheated on his bride-to-be just to make a sale.

How would cheating make you a sale? I don't see the causality.

Presumably they were cheating on their bride with a buyer...

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

#255
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like reading Q&A on Amazon listings, because lots of people answer "I have no idea" or similar. I've only received a few of the email prompts for these things, but as I recall they almost make it sound like some potential shopper has decided to ask YOU, specifically YOU, about a particular product feature.

The amazon ones are truly amazing. I have wondered for years who is answering those. I had thought that questions were routed to previous buyers somehow, but that's never happened for me...

Oh that reminds me of a funny story. I used to work for a company that sold various software and one month after their purchase, they'd get an email asking if they would like to review the product. If they ignored that, after another month they'd get one more email asking if they would like to review the product (after that they'd get no more emails).

Well I was going through and approving the reviews (just for stopping spam reviews), and I found a guy leaving a review explaining that he's very sorry but he hasn't had time to use the product as his wife has come down with a bad case of the shingles - I seem to remember he went into quite a lot of detail and obviously hadn't realised this review could have been made public.

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

#256
post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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").

Having Google put fake hotel reservation confirmation links in your calendar is a "reasonable level of intrusion?" It's amazing what we've become conditioned to.

Is this something Google actually did/does? It doesn't really fit with my experience of them.

Now, if the confirmation email contained this upsell in text or in schema.org metadata or whatever and Google pulled it over, that feels very much like something they would do.

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

#257

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…

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)

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

#258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

In this case, the email is already flagged as spam in Gmail, but the calendar invite still gets added.

To me it seems pretty clear what the behaviour should be. If flagged as spam, do not add to calendar.

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

#259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having Google put fake hotel reservation confirmation links in your calendar is a "reasonable level of intrusion?" It's amazing what we've become conditioned to.

Is this something Google actually did/does? It doesn't really fit with my experience of them. Now, if the confirmation email contained this upsell in text or in schema.org metadata or whatever and Google pulled it over, that feels very much like something they would do.

In my experience that's what happened. Some ad text on the bottom of the email got picked up (ie "hotels available during your trip"). It had "hotel" and a date range. That's all a faulty Google AI needs to create a hotel stay event.

In fact I'd adventure to say this is an exploit by the airline upsell team, not Google.

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

#260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I bet you're right. Reminds me a little of the scenario where people bizarrely ask a forum if they can bring their dog to a hotel, some random person says "yes" and then you wonder if the hotel declined to accept the dog if the owner would say "well Bob off the internet said it would be fine"

I love seeing those amazon q and a sections, full of brilliance. Q "Will this fit my laptop" A "I don't know"
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