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Comment by KyeRussell | Hacker News Reader

Misleading title and some people have already taken the bait. This isn't s deprecation of Drive. It's a depredation of the Drive desktop sync implementation, being replaced with an on-demand desktop integration.

Trust people with a chip on their shoulder against Google jumping at any chance to get angry about them though.

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We've just reverted the editorialized title of “GSuite Drive File Stream Deprecates Google Drive” to that of the article.

Thank you. Every article or comment I've seen regarding this has been "omg Google is eating all my files!!!".

I know Google bashing has been super popular lately, but the amount of toxicity is getting exhausting.

Not even that. If you prefer the old behavior, there is a Backup and Sync client that does the same thing. This is just Google's competitor to Dropbox Project Infinite.

Exactly, though Google isn't itself really clear in its docs, and there's some sneaky/creepy stuff apparently turned on like sharing to the cloud every USB stick and SD card you plug in by default [which Google Drive did not do: beware when upgrading to B&S]. That's going to be a whole "WiFi snooping secret data" saga all over again if my interpretation is correct.

http://www.earth.org.uk/note-on-backup-energy-efficiency.htm...

[Edit to make clearer that B&S has an apparently new worrying behaviour unannounced if you do a straight upgrade from GD.]

It sounds like it backs up photos from USB sticks and SD cards by default, which is probably expected behavior for people who use digital cameras that connect via USB or write to SD card. Does it also back up non-photo files from those devices?

That wasn't clear.

But it's going to end up sucking up a bunch of private photos even if restricted to that (kids, wild parties, whatever).

If not, think how many businesses exchange moderately- to very- sensitive documents privately in person, if too private to put on-line? Hmm, USB sticks...

Anyhow, I hope you're right. Have you found documentation to that effect?

I mean, it won't do anything unless you install it, and if you install a file sync tool you'd better know what it does. I hope that's clear from the landing page, though.

Note though that if you were like me already running GD and upgrade to B&S (as you would have to by Dec 11 to keep the functionality) there is no warning of this new slurping.

You can turn it off completely in Preferences.

If you notice that it's there and that it's on.

Which I didn't immediately.

It's tucked away at the end and without a checkbox like other items in the same view. Indeed, it looks at first glance to be informational.

Someone in the UX team may have thought that they were being clever, but like the W10 'cancel means upgrade' debacle, it'll cause trouble.

I do hope that this is just unfortunate design and that USB item is only enabled if the checkbox above it is on also. Perhaps I'm just having a bad hair day: I don't normally do conspiracy theories.

>Misleading title and some people have already taken the bait.

Curious why you say it's misleading? The title is 'Drive File Stream launching to all G Suite customers' which doesn't say anything more than a new feature or app is coming to ALL G Suite customers.

Not misleading or click bait. I don't know why you think that cause knee-jerks reactions like that also don't help.

The previous title was "GSuite Drive File Stream Deprecates Google Drive", which is absolutely leaving out a large part of the context

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