Live data from Hacker News

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

support.google.com

261–270 of 295 posts

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

#261
post #90

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…

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.

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)

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

#262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

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.

https://owncloud.org/

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

#263
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,…

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

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

#264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's big money for a lot of Americans, even ones using Google calendar. It's effective bait.

$72,000/year. Individual median income is around $30,000.

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

#265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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 r…

Exactly - In my experience anyone could share their google docs to everyone under the sun, with or without notification. You don't get asked permissions to agree to have a shared file in any case.

So as long as you don't filter out the share file requests from other people, there's no need to keep the notes about "some stranger has shared this file with you". Coz you wouldn't care.

Though it's probably good practice in comms to inform someone by chat/separate email that "here's a new shared file you should be looking at."

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

#266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And each of those 10 successes tells 50, Don’t you get it?! They wouldn’t do it if it didn’t work, and you are vastly outnumbered. It’s not right, it’s bloody annoying, but it’s there and it’s not going away. Google needs to fix the root problem, so that the spammy behaviour is not possible.

It would stop working if less people said "it will work even if you're difficult!" and more people just took a little time out of their workday to be difficult.

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

#267
post #64
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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

Unlimited Drive Storage by splitting binary files into base64:

- https://github.com/stewartmcgown/uds

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19907271

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

#268

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.

[deleted]

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

#269

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.

> 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 entir…

I remember… I was at Stanford in 2000 and the future looked so bright.

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

#270
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,…

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.
Post reply on HN