Google Drive – How do I stop others from sharing files with me? | Hacker News Reader

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

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476 pointsmariocesar285 comments

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 completely. Quite a pain. And yes, just like this bug, you'd get lovely "eat my pussy" events popping up on your calendar and reminders.

Thanks Google, you're the best /s

This hit a bunch of us about a year ago, maybe two years, I forget. It was incredibly annoying and made me completely stop relying on gmail for calendar stuff.

I used to get these in Russian (I don't speak Russian and have no links with Russia). The worst part was I couldn't delete them from the Android app, which is like probably everyone else the only place I ever see my Google calendar. The functionality to delete them was hidden at calendar.google.com or somewhere I'd never had occasion to use. I don't get this spam any more, so I guess Google fixed it at some level.

I'm actually getting this spam now (started a couple months ago). Would love advice on how to get rid of it!

I think this is the guide I used awhile back to disable the feature: https://lifehacker.com/how-to-keep-spam-out-of-your-google-c...

> Would love advice on how to get rid of it!

This will sound facetious, but I mean it sincerely. Change email provider. I was an original "invite only" user of GMail. Eventually, I got so sick of Google's complete u-turn on their original philosophy that I changed, despite the cost in time and effort that decision entailed. It's worth it. But I will recommend you choose providers carefully. If you're not paying for it in some way (e.g. Fastmail), be concerned. Also, the ability to use your own domain is a huge boon (you'll never have to go through the excessive email-change pain again).

They have not fixed it.

I wish I could turn off the feature entirely, but I still occasionally get Russian spam events on my calendar. They also try to notify me at ~3am (fortunately I turn notifications completely off at night).

The emails themselves land in my spam folder... but no one said "hey, maybe calendar events shouldn't be created from the spam folder" at inception, so I guess it'll never be implemented.

I report them as spam when I get them, but I also discovered that I can't report calendar events as spam in the mobile app.

If it's any help, I _think_ this is the guide I used to disable the feature: https://lifehacker.com/how-to-keep-spam-out-of-your-google-c...

It was awhile ago, but that looks like the right link and jives with my current settings. I don't get any more spam on my calendar, but obviously need to manually respond Yes to any email invites to get them to show on the calendar.

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.

That sounds like an excellent way to make me ban all inbound traffic from that vendor.

It's going directly from the vendor to Google. How exactly would you block that traffic?

You may not be able to block the calendar spam with current tools, but if you're in a decision-making role, you can block e-mails or blacklist the vendor so your purchasing department knows that they cannot order from them.

> It's used not just by spammers, but by sales reps, too.

Not sure there's a distinction there.

Spammers don't have the corporate liability protections that allow corporate employees to spam without worry. So really, spammers are better people.

> 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.

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.

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.

I'm not claiming that you're wrong because I don't have any data to the contrary, but "They wouldn’t do it if it didn’t work" isn't a strong argument. It's only true assuming rational actors and perfect information.

It is quite possible that the successes are more visible than the failures and thus it seems like it works. Or it "works" for the sales rep because he gets more leads and thus a bigger bonus, while hurting the company - but the company hasn't figured that out yet. Or it works in the short term but isn't worth the reputation damage in the long term.

Of course it's also possible that it just works, just pointing out that reality shows that people and companies often do things that are just stupid.

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.

I hear "they wouldn't do it if it didn't work" about many dark patterns. Is there proof to this? I suspect that these kinds of things are easier to measure than less aggressive tactics, leading to a false sense of efficacy.

And what of the efficacy compared to the negative reputation gained from such practices? How do they measure that?

> 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.

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 point of view of their prospects; mediocre ones cannot.

That really hasn’t been my experience when working alongside sales people at the companies I’ve worked for.

I definitely wouldn’t call any of them sales droids. Usually they’re just given really tough goals and quotas to hit.

And while none of the salespeople I’ve worked with would book unsolicited appointments, I could see it happening at companies who don’t have a very mature sales org and just throw their account managers to the sharks and expect them to make it rain.

From experience, I suspect that most salespeople who resort to invasive tactics really don’t expect everybody to be excited about their product. They are just desperately trying to keep their heads above water to avoid getting fired - a very human, non droid like thing to do.

That doesn’t excuse it, of course.

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...

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

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

I still get this. It was bad enough on my "sign up for shit" email address that I had to disconnect that account from my smartphone because it kept spamming me with notifications in my calendar to "earn $1500 a week working at home!"

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.

You just reminded me why I decoupled my google calendar from my iPhone calendar a few years ago. Just the other day I was thinking I’d like them up, but something made me feel like I shouldn’t...

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 entire websites dedicate to the purpose of "email address images". It was ... a wild time.

Then, GMAIL! For the first time since the dawn of SPAM we could post our addresses in plaintext, in the light of day. We didn't hide them like dirty underwear. The whole WORLD could see our email addresses, and we didn't have a care in the world. The smell of fresh email was in the air, unbesmirched by SPAM.

Perhaps the young ones forget. Perhaps Google has forgotten. Lost to the sands of Calendar spam...

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

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.

Another lovely Google feature that lasted for about 10sec. after I discovered it:

Booked a flight, got the receipt through Gmail. Google then auto-populated my calendar with the flights - fine. They also populated it with a hotel reservation, and a link saying I hadn't yet confirmed the reservation for Hilton. I was going to stay with family, w/no intention of staying in a hotel. I couldn't believe the blatant hijacking and spamming involved here from my private info - bad enough if they'd merely spammed a hotel advert for those dates.

Contacted Google, no way to turn it off without turning off the entire feature. Done. Permanently.

I couldn't believe anyone could think this was a good idea.

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.

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.

My first thought was that it was from something like an airline/travel upsell team that somehow sneaked through, but my interaction w/Google convinced me otherwise (sorry I don't recall all the details, as it was years ago).

Google definitely made clear that if I wanted to accept them auto-populating my calendar with the flights in my email, I also had to accept the fake hotel bookings and lying "...confirm?" messages and manually delete them.

I'd be mildly ok with Google sending an offer email resembling: "Here's a potentially good hotel for your trip, would you like to book this, confirm, and insert in calendar?" (ya, it's spam, but at least sort of on-topic).

But what Google was doing is highly offensive and dishonest.

They presume to make a booking, populate it into my calendar, then send an email & alert in the calendar claiming that I failed to confirm the booking that they claim that I made -- flat-out lying to me, hoping I'm just in too much of a rush to notice that their booking was not one that I'd intended.

That was just so far beyond crossing the line that I want nothing to do with any such feature.

Sadly, it is also another bad example to magnify the stereotype of technology people with no ethical grounding (broadly, I don't think it's true, but it happens enough that it smears all of us).

It just feels more likely to me that the answer you got ("you just need to turn off this feature totally to avoid this") didn't mean Google was using it themselves to generate that "ad," but that it was someone basically taking advantage of the existence of the mail-to-calendar feature unscrupulously, and Google didn't have any controls you could use to stop that other than just turning the feature off.

That's still Google's fault to a degree, since that's pretty predictable behavior they'd need to account for, but it wouldn't be the major intrusion that you're interpreting it as.

Um, google is 1) automatically reading my mail, 2) noticing that I made an air travel reservation, 3) populating my calendar with the relevant times, 4) populating my calendar with a fake hotel reservation disguised to look as if I made it, and 5) sending both email and calendar notifications that I'd failed to confirm that fake reservation.

Items 1, 2, and 3 are ok, and are the feature

The fake reservation and "confirm" requests are straight-up deceptive trade practices - an attempt to steal money and change my travel plans by deceptive means.

For a moment, let's go with your idea that Google didn't do #4 & #5.

First, questions: When did I give Google permission to open up my calendar for anyone in the world to populate? Considering the levels of spam in email, telephony, & text, what idiot thought that was a good idea?

Aside from the deceptive trade practice, this is also a massive security risk - with everyone's calendar open to the world, and without advance warning, it'd be straightforward to route a person into a variety of dangerous situations if they aren't extremely careful - this is way beyond 'click the link ransomware', and up to 'go to the appointment in your ostensibly secure calendar and get kidnapped'. These are just a few quick examples.

So, either Google themselves is directly implementing deceptive trade practices, or they are stupidly enabeling all kinds of new cybercrime.

In short, if Google is actually enabling this kind of access for random 3rd parties, it is a WORSE intrusion than if they are merely doing it themselves.

Either way, I'd expect far more responsible thinking from such a supposedly mature company.

This must be fairly recent, because about a year ago I bought tickets, got a receipt in my gmail, and it didn't try to upsell me a hotel.

Actually, it was probably five years ago

I lambasted them for it and instantly cancelled all such features, which are otherwise potentially quite helpful.

I hope this means that enough others had the same reaction that they quit that nonsense.

I'd been wondering about this phenomenon for years. However, it happened infrequently and was never enough of a bother to dig into.

> Keep getting spam shared on an account I don't use much, but keep getting notifications. Not fun when my 9 yo son is on my phone and a notification pops up that someone shared "eat my pussy baby". Google needs to address this.

Oh. That's bad.

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

Classic parenting strategy here. Connect & Redirect. Well played.

But one day they will remember the event and think "Dad, You sly dog..."

And then they'll respect you all the more.

Oh, De bussy! I love de bussy! https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UKO-ebWS4Ko (Family Guy - Peter finishes on the Bach not on the Debussy)

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

I'm ashamed to admit I lost my composure reading this. lmfao

I have been getting documents with titles that seem like pornography shared with me recently as well. It is truly infuriating because I can't tell where they are coming from. It seems like this started around ~6 months ago. I think there is a report as spam option, but it doesn't seem to have stopped the onslaught.

I remember when Google's facial recognized black people as gorillas.

They fixed it very quickly.

Showing "eat my pussy baby" to a young kid is obviously not as bad. /s

The mods on the support forums who make it sound like basic functionality missing from their product is your own fault for not submitting some kind of ticket deserve the gaslighting prize of the year for each of the last 5 years.

They don't even have an option to show you how much space folders take up, when they charge you based on space usage.

https://support.google.com/drive/thread/3970069?hl=en

> 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!

How so? someone has to share the files first and there is a quota on the amount of times a shared file can be accessed.

open a dummy account, upload and share it with your main account

...or spend $2/mo and get way more storage without the hassle. This fits into the same category as "you can get as much free catsup as you want from fast food restaurants" - not a really useful life hack.

Until google's automated process ban all those accounts. That method is used by many pirate video sites and they'll have to constantly play cat and mouse with google. Do not try it if your account contains anything important as once you got banned there is no way to restore your account due to absolute lack of human tech supports on google side.

Have you tried opening a dummy account lately on Google? You typically need a phone number to verify, and not some VOIP number but a major carrier. That is a lot of effort for 15GB of extra data, when you can just pay $12/mo for unlimited with G Suite.

Is it that hard to get a burner number in the US ? In France it literally takes 30s to get one at a shop

Yes it is pretty difficult, and like I said they limit what phone numbers you can use. It ends up costing more money than just paying for additional storage.

Unlimited Drive Storage by splitting binary files into base64:

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

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

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.

No. The core of good product management is making decisions that make your product so attractive to users that they get their friends and coworkers to use it, too.

Sometimes that means minimalism. Sometimes it means that you have ease of use. Sometimes you realize that your users are actually not your customers, and you need to make the product attractive to the customers, not the users. That way lies madness and enterprise sales.

If a bunch of people are asking for a bunch of features it sounds like they have made their product attractive to users.

Not necessarily. There was a time there were few players in the SaaS office collaboration suites, so the default was google apps. Now that other alternatives exist people might be asking for some of the features offered by others.

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.

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 parties to participate? I know helpful strangers is nothing new to the internet, I guess I'm just weirded out because there's never an official answer on MSFT's official forum and these sorts of questions are not really the sort of "playful" puzzles one might encounter helping strangers on SO/Reddit/Discord.

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 for some unknown reason, a legion of people who will give this fake support for free for internet points.

And the guess of an answer they give is always the same:

1. A word-for-word copy of generic support steps (e.g. try restarting, try clearing your cache, log out of iCloud and back in again, etc)

2. Have you reset your PRAM?

3. Wow you have? Then you'll need to reset your NVRAM.

And don't forget the mandatory "reset your SMC"

Real answer they don’t want to give.

   “Look we got one guy keeping the system alive, we’re not paying for another one.”

Apple's discussion boards are useless, but at least they have actual phone and email channels to get an answer from an employee (usually). And Apple doesn't generally charge for the phone call itself (they will charge for out-of-warranty hardware work, but generally don't for software support even out of warranty).

With Google, more often than not, community "support" through their forums is the only option. Where official phone and email channels exist to get support, they're generally restricted to paying customers only, on the business side of their business only-- users of their general consumers services have no options.

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.”

Ditto for the same person and similar reasons (code signing and notarization).

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.

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.

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!"

Honestly, that last line reads exactly like something from BOFH[0], right before he gets the PFY to commit some heinous act of domestic terrorism on the unsuspecting enterprise support salesman. Some things apparently never change.

[0]https://www.theregister.com/data_centre/bofh/

In the '90's I had a mission that I carried out by offering answers to questions on CompuServe fora pertaining to Windows. In 1996 Microsoft decided to embrace and extend this by offering perks to the people who were most active. That program has been revised and renamed over the years. I wouldn't say that I succeeded in my mission, but I would say I don't feel I need to do such things personally. The people you are pointing out seem to need to offer you a solution, however off-point, and need you to accept it formally if you indeed find it to be a solution, and I speculate, seem to be paid and possibly try to make a living doing it now. A possible explanation is that Microsoft doesn't want to be obligated to provide online support any more than Google does. But they want to indeed offer online support for the time being, as casually as possible, and they are regulating some people by measuring some aspects of the support activities of some people.

They also seem to just skim read questions for keywords and give you canned solutions for problems they already know how to fix. If your problem is either new or something that's not actually fixable the thread turns in to a back and forth of them clearly not actually comprehending that and you restating your issue in different ways in futility.

It's comical to read when it's someone else's problem.

Or they'll ask for rafts of info that anyone paying attention can see is unrelated. Those posts, I always imagine them ending with "heh heh, THAT should keep Batman & Robin busy for a while! mwa ha ha, ha HA HA HA HA HAAA!"

Google support forums are the same, the "product experts" who write most of the answers don't work for Google and are limited in their ability to escalate things.

And maybe this has changed, but I think the Microsoft support forum used to show the "accepted" answer twice, once in the thread and once in the accepted answer section. Or something similar; whatever it was I felt like I was reading the same thing twice.

Getting Microsoft MVP is based, in part, on community involvement. This is one way to show community engagement.

Note, MVP is a quite valuable achievement, including licenses to pretty much all Microsoft products and access to product teams within Microsoft. Many partners will hire MVPs favorably, as well.

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"

The difference is that the hotel didn't create, own or manage the forum.

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...

I've received a few email notifications for amazon products. They seems to be sent for new questions when you previously purchased the product (not necessarily received it yet).

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.

Most of the answers are so useless or plainly bad. That's why I try as much as possible to answer questions for products I've bought.

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

Looks like the answer is no: https://support.google.com/communities/answer/9138806?hl=en

> When you become an expert, you'll get exclusive program perks, like special badges in the Google Help Communities, direct access to Google employees to provide product feedback and a chance to test Google products before they're released.

So, the reward for helping with the forum are some badges and a chance to be Google's beta tester, and it appears to be working? Maybe they can launch some sort of mechanical turks service in the future where the workers are paid with this "rewards" instead of money.

Sounds like a great opportunity for Box and Dropbox to provided helpful forum answers about alternatives to Google Drive. Knowing Google they are probably training bots on these forum answers so the Google bots themselves might start recommending competitor products.

I am member of one of these programs, and it's not worth it once you get everything unlocked. At best you get invited to HQ, but that's it.

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

Google products are more likely to be suddenly deprecated with no offboarding plan than to care what features an overwhelming majority of customers want.

Most Google products exist solely for the benefit of the Google engineers who use them for resume padding & career growth. They lose money for Google the company and they infuriate loyal customers up until they are capriciously surprise decommissioned.

Even better, they make it pretty impossible to manage your online storage of photos since they split it out of drive.google.com

It isn't impossible, just not convenient like it used to be. What I do is sync a copy to my backup device, and use the web interface to download any collages or effects that it auto-generates.

You can then use rclone to sync deletions, which uses their API.

How do you sync a copy to your backup device? My understanding is that it's no longer to programmatically grab the original images, only compressed images are available via the API.

I use one-way Syncthing, so my phone automatically backups my pictures to Google Photos (using the Google Photos app) and my computer (using Syncthing). Then I copy them into a folder locally like they existed previously on Google Drive by year.

Then I run rclone sync:

  rclone sync --dry-run gphotos:media/by-year /local/storage/path

Then if I delete some pictures from Google Photos, the same sync command will delete them from my local backup.

What do you mean by that? I'm curious because I switched to Google Drive after Dropbox discontinued any real photo support a few years back. I like Dropbox more for file syncing, but put up with Google Drive's weaknesses because I get much better photo management.

Google Photos is now a separate standalone product from Google Drive. You can upload images to either place but they are not synced.

This move frustrated me to no end. Makes backing up my Google Photos that much more of a PITA because you have to use Takeout, which isn't straightforward - if you have a large library, you manually have to download 50+ zip files and "auto download" extensions don't seem to work with the Takeout interface last time I tried.

This reminds me of the obnoxious know-it-all that lives under the bridge on the QNAP forums.

I know exactly who you're referring to

I can’t imagine how a company like that would let such an individual interact with customers.

Do you like QNAP products? I have experience with a few Synology NASes, and was looking at QNAP’s media center NAS products, and they seem nice. It seems like QNAP has a bit more open source support, which I definitely like. Ubuntu Linux Station looks neat, like a first-party supported integrated Ubuntu Docker container? That QNAP’s web management and the device itself runs Linux under the hood is awesome; this may be the case as well with Synology products, so I don’t mean to draw a comparison where there is none.

Anyway, any recommendations for QNAP gear?

FreeNAS

/partial sarcasm

I’ve run FreeNAS as well, but I found there was something strange about the involvement of iXsystems I couldn’t put my finger on. It just didn’t seem professionally done on the web site, or the web GUI. It was 98% of the way there functionality-wise, but the GUI was just overwhelming. Personal preference I guess. Perhaps there are other themes, and being open source, I’m sure it can be configured to my liking. I am glad the project exists, all that said. I just don’t know if it’s something I can sell to a client. I am more than comfortable running it myself, and have done so; to catch network scan jobs for SMBv1 only MFPs, for instance.

Well, they almost had a way better GUI which I was using in beta, until the lead developer on that and iXsystems got into a big spat and he left, causing iXsystems to have to quickly slap together an upgrade to their old UI themselves, so...

I've got a QNAP TS-451 and it works, but I don't find that the added features are really worth anything. I basically use it as a dumb storage server (NFS, SMB, and iSCSI) and for that it works really well. The only bit of smarts I use is the Hybrid Backup Sync utility to back up important folders to external drives and, when I get around to setting it up, some kind of off-site backup.

I've just found too many odd limitations with the device to use it for much more than that. For example, you can set up VLANs and you can bind services to specific physical network interfaces, but you can't bind a service to a VLAN interface. This is what made me give up on the added features.

Also, be aware that some added features have moved to a subscription model[0]. And, if you expose your QNAP to the internet, there's a risk of getting malware[1]. On the plus side, this has made them open up a tiny bit[2][3].

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/qnap/comments/hmsw6a/beware_of_prem...

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2020/07/27/qnap_attack_warning/

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/qnap/comments/fd0g71/psa_im_having_...

[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/qnap/comments/fgmeu3/psa_qsnatch_up...

I'm not a person who uses to return products, and I had mine for just two weeks. It was constantly reading/writing to disk. All the time. It wasn't indexing: the QNAP system has a lot of small services and some of them write logs to disk or do god knows what. Given the particular architecture of the NAS processor I wasn't able to install cli tools to analyze the problem further, but at this point I realized the NAS wasn't doing what I wanted in the first place: ease my life and allow me to automate backups.

I ended up adding one of the disks to my PC and the other to a home server.

I must admit though that the QNAP solutions look very helpful if you disregard the abusive disk R/W activity and the inconsistent UI. You may be able to set up complex backup schemes quite fast with it.

If you are interested in virtualization and advanced usage, be sure to get one with an ARM processor at least, because it may be difficult to get packages for it on other obscure architectures.

I’ve a 10 bay system populated with 4TB drives that I use as a dumb data dump in RAID6. They’re okay systems, but as others have said they come with a lot of useless complexity. At a previous job had an 8 bay system that had a dodgy backplane that was a pain to deal with.

When I read the recommended response in thread you linked, I just feel like they're acknowledging the feature doesn't exist and suggesting to use Send Feedback as a potential avenue to increase the chance that the feature gets implemented. It may be that important features are missing, but I don't think the forum mods can do anything about that and the reply didn't seem rude to me.

This could be because Google may outsource everything, especially their customer service, and so you’re essentially communicating with a call center in another country that has no incentive to be nice.

That’s a failure on Google’s part. If feedback forum mods can’t also influence the roadmap, that’s a missed opportunity.

Even if it’s as simple as having 50 votes on the bug tracker, there should be some way for forum mods to synthesize and share feedback to the dev team for what to build.

I personally hate how there’s never a feedback loop on these posts noting how a change was made. Microsoft is pretty bad about this too.

“Please submit a suggestion” is a really unsatisfying experience to a user. Especially for really basic functions. Especially when not implementing makes the company money.

I’m surprised Google hasn’t hopped-on to the UserVoice bandwagon like Microsoft and Adobe did.

Yeah it’s so cool how Microsoft Teams hasn’t implemented custom emojis. Had to write a script to pull all our Slack ones down since we’re being mandated to switch over.

> Yeah it’s so cool how Microsoft Teams hasn’t implemented custom emojis

I agree, completely unironically.

Some things just don't belong in "work" chats, sorry.

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 be fixed.

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.)

I’m taking about paid tools- gmail, google docs. And in Microsoft’s case Office.

I don’t think it’s better to go from recommendation, to X years of silence, to rollout. I’d rather know if something is prioritized and in progress. I’d like to plan for rollout. Maybe it changes my upgrade and purchase planning.

My main point is the current technique sucks and makes me want to use products less. I’ve used support forums for decades and they can be non frustrating when I feel I am part of a community.

The current method seems “us vs. then” with neglect for any meaningful change. They should just do better. Not perfect. Just not horrible.

Apple forums are also like this. There are a bunch of Apple apologists full of zeal, trivializing problems and giving people false workarounds.

Yeah I asked why I couldnt download old emails between when I started the Gmail Pro or whatever subscription and then subscription lapsed and the genius bootlickers on Support duty said "well its your fault for not continuing to pay, what do you expect?"

Of course the data is available to download if I pay, but my previous 2 years of payment didn't count. (mysterious)

Will literally never pay Google for anything ever again after that, its actually evil.

Compare that to the new service hey.com which claims you can download/export forever.

Fuck Google. Just bought a new MacBook Pro yesterday and I will never install or use any Google products on it ever.

Forever is a very long time (and therefore a very bold claim for any SaaS app to make).

See also "lifetime passes".

See also "lifetime passes".

And SiriusXM "lifetime subscriptions."

> genius bootlickers

I guffawed. I don't understand who thinks it's a good idea to have a bunch of clueless volunteer fanboys represent your first line of support. So many forums are like this though. Microsoft is especially polluted with it last I checked. It screams "so big we're officially completely out of touch".

Wasting space in Google products is comically easy too, because it’s so “integrated” that you can have crap everywhere and may or may not know how to get rid of it.

I tried uploading a title image to my YouTube channel, and somehow doing so created an entire Google Photos account (even though the channel image is not a photo!). I dragged-and-dropped several replacement images because the YouTube UI for layout preview/cropping is so terrible that I didn’t get it right the first few times. Except the images are not replaced, they’re added, and there is nothing in YouTube to delete them. You have to go into Google Photos, and several screens later “delete” your “photos” of useless uploads. Except they’re not deleted, they’re in the “Trash”; etc. etc.

These are basic things that wouldn’t be stupidly hard to do if anyone there had any power over, or concern with, the full flow of using their products.

It goes deeper. Last time I checked I found previous uploads or deleted images in two different Picasa interfaces, one had YouTube and profile related images, even wallpapers from Gmail. The other had some of my Google Photos. I don't have an account to confirm but it's probably still there.

Wow, meanwhile Google lost all my vacation photos back in 2014 or so. It was a painful lesson, but I'm glad that all I lost was one vacation's worth of pictures, haha. Never trust a cloud

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 unusual of a request. I refuse to believe that we're the first company ever that wanted to remove people from our Google Drive. Why do you make it so difficult?

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).

ftp folder for each.

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

Our solution is to clone docs which we plan to share externally. Then, at least, it's a doc that has already been shared out, instead of docs that you continue to update.

I'm not sure if you've seen this or not?

https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/52093/see-all-sh...

Generally, you would disable an account to revoke sharing. Are you sharing these outside your domain? That could be part of the problem. I agree there should be an easier way to remove sharing for everything for a particular user (and there may be). Have you checked out GAM?

https://github.com/jay0lee/GAM

Yep, we're sharing outside your domain, but that's a feature that they advertise and recommend. I've started to check GAM, but what should have been a chore in our sprint has quickly turned into a fullblown story. I'll have to find some time to waste figuring out how to do this thing that I can't believe Google doesn't have built in.

Again, did you try the shortcut listed here?

https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/52093/see-all-sh...

When I search to:email@here.com it shows all the documents shared with that person, then I can Ctrl+a and click "share" and remove that person from all of them at once.

I've tried, but I don't have the option to select all.

Ctrl+a is the keyboard shortcut.

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 controls and user management.

That might be true, but nowhere in the UI does it recommend that. If you want to share a file, nothing suggests you consider sharing a folder instead. And even then, we'd still have to find and disable all of the folders that had been shared with the ex-associate. That would reduce the number of items to un-share, but the fundamental problem of having no easy way to find and handle each item is still there.

Yeah, we're going to Box for everything outside our organization for exactly those reasons. If Google Drive lived up to the "enterprise" label they stick on accounts, we would stick with it. It's just not business-ready in its current form, though.

It's not a UI thing. It's a general recommendation about workflows because folders are usually easier to manage than files. Have you tried using Google Groups? Add them to a single "external associates" group and then you can just edit group membership in the future instead of managing files.

You need the ability to verify that no files are shared with them. "Adhering to a workflow" isn't sufficient.

The other person commented that the UI didn't suggest using folders over files. Why would it? That's up to your specific workflow, and using folders or groups is general advice for bigger organizations.

How you verify access is something else entirely, but the same advice helps in that case too.

> 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’.

> 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.

Shameless plug, but the product I'm currently working on does this: https://altitudenetworks.com/offboarding.html

You're definitely not the first company to want this!

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)

> 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.

That's still the case. We require 2FA, and 2FA setup on first login, but then you can't log in the first time because you don't have 2FA. We have a group we put new employees in so that they can set it up, then we remove them afterward.

I was pretty sure they had made this better recently. I recall being able to remove the new users group, but I'm no longer working there, so I can't verify. (Also, I didn't have to make a lot of new users in the recent past before I left, because of the merger stuff)

This can be so confusing for non-tech literate people too. My mother asked me to help her, saying she was hacked because there was porn in her Google Drive.

It can be really difficult for non-power users to even understand why this is happening or what to do to fix this.

That's more of the fault of Google Drive UI being terrible and failing to differentiate mine / shared / someone else's.

>differentiate mine / shared / someone else's

They're all Google's.

Tangential to this is that calendar/invite spam continues to be an issue as well. Want to trick someone into visiting a URL? Just send them a calendar invite and chances are they will click it.

Yes! they are still there.

https://twitter.com/GeorgeResch/status/1041459084636119040

What drives me crazy is that this will happen even if the email with the invite never hits your inbox and goes straight to spam. Outright insane to not patch that ASAP.

Answer: find the email address of the person the product manager of Google Drive reports to, and start sharing stuff with them.

(/s: not condoning doxxing here)

Genius!

I just tried this. Let's see what happens.

Please share the email address (use a throwaway account) so that everyone can do it as well. Otherwise it's pointless.

No, I’m sorry I cannot do that, for me that would be doxxing. I work for a government contractor and have access to a databases of executive contact information. I think if you spent a little time with a search engine you might be able to accomplish the same thing otherwise.

So you used your database to look up information to intentionally share files with an unwilling party? Interesting.

If they didn’t want files to be shared with them, Google employees are empowered to fix this in ways non-employees are not. If they show up in the share list, one can only presume they consented to this, as there is a way to opt-out; there should be a menu to configure this setting as well, and that is a good point to make, but it is a different, related point.

That sounds kind of unethical. Or is the reasoning, you could have found it on Google anyway, so you might as well do it the easy way?

Just because I have access to resources that you don't doesn't mean I should do the work for you. That's an entirely new level of wokeness.

I wasn't suggesting you give me the information, but that you probably shouldn't have obtained it in that way. It might also be illegal?

HN is not 4Chan

I had to Google what 4Chan means. Fair enough.

The sad reality is that this is the only way to ever get anywhere with Google's seemingly build it then abandon it services. You build something to move up the ladder while someone else is tossed at your ladder that is on its way crashing down at varying speeds.

Now they embrace, extend, extinguish, and sometimes just shut it down cause it's not being marketed for a price at all.

What's your technique of finding the name of a relevant product manager?

Ask someone you know at Google who is high enough up to make an intro.

LOL, you're assuming anyone gets promoted by fixing issues at Google. Wrong. You build some new shit and switch teams. Someone pitches a new project and builds from scratch. Rinse and repeat.

This particular issue happens (at least that's my recollection a few years ago) frequently enough at Google that there were memes about it internally. Not sure giving additional feedback would help.

This is so glaringly apparent as a user. I think Google makes some fantastic products, but the number of "This has to be so exceedingly easy to fix, but Google just doesn't give a damn" issues I've hit is crazy.

Here's one simple one: the number of volume steps in Android is only 16: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/37035441 . This means that the difference between off and the lowest level volume can be pretty big if you're trying to be quiet, e.g. avoid waking someone in the same room. I almost wish they would just close issues with a "We don't give a shit" resolution status.

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 about what company you want to be. Is it better for you to invest resources into incremental improvements to polish the final 2% or try again and maybe make a breakthrough. You have to look it from multiple angles too: are you going to attract the most talented people giving them such gruntwork or will they quit? Is there any meaningful incremental business you could get from polishing Android (remember, polished Android is more expensive and has to compete head-on with a company whose focus is to polish and is best set up to do so). It's complicated. There's a place for multiple models.

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

"Nothing works" is certainly not an accurate description of the reality (It's more like 80-90% works just great). As for who cares, your colleagues certainly do (there are limits on how much "potato and meat" you can mix with talent before messing the recipe up). Also note that the companies we are talking about here are not in the technology business, they are in the empire business, so they certainly care about who gets to help control the empire and who defects to a competitor.

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

> Is it better for you to invest resources into incremental improvements to polish the final 2% or try again and maybe make a breakthrough.

I would argue that maybe they should try Option 1, instead of sunsetting their Nth chat app, or migrating everyone from Google Music (which would very much benefit from some polish) onto Google Youtube Music (which I don't understand the value of for me as a listener.)

I could buy the "either/or" proposition with other companies, but not with Google. They have so much money and so many people they could easily (a) fix lots of these things that drive users nuts and (b) make a "breakthrough" (but as other commenters have pointed out, if their "breakthrough" is another chat app, maybe they should pull back).

They quite simply don't incentivize teams to fix this shit.

It's not just a resource limit issue. It's more akin to designing the tax code. At the top, you have to design a performance review system that trickles down to 100k people who operate in different parts of your organization without special casing too much to incentivize the desired behavior (special casing or discretion may add complexity, potential unfairness and bias, or effectively segment the company reducing internal mobility or make some products less attractive drawing away subsets of talent you may need there). To make the matters more difficult it's not like the CEO gets to write it on a tablet; as with the tax code, it is not designed in a vacuum, and the people who write it have existing political incentives too. Life is complicated.

iOS also has 16 volume steps

Many organizations work like this. People get credit for orphaned projects they no longer work on.

Then, more responsible developers have to waste their lives maintaining code that was designed to be orphaned from the start.

Googler here promoted twice by taking over a team/project, simplifying it, and making it hum.

This is a common narrative about Google. There is some truth to it but the blanket "nobody gives a shit about anything other than launches" claim is bogus.

Yes, obviously there's hyperbole in that statement, but there's no denying the fundamental incentive structure is at heart of most of polish issues of this nature; that said, as I argue in my followup comments, I personally don't see the bias towards launches is a bad choice for the organization at large, especially since personal craftsmanship from some individual employees and their own values more often than not covers up the shortcoming in corporate incentives.

Bonus points for slipping your resume past the HR filters this way.

More likely for your google account to get suspended than for them to make a product change.

Did you ever see the time where spammers could share calendar invites with you that would automatically get applied to your calendar without you accepting it...

Google eventually added an option to change this behavior. Guess it will take a critical mass of complaints to get something similar for Google Drive.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/google-calendar-spam-is-on-the-...

I thought this would be years old but this article was written late August 2019.

iCloud had a similar problem in 2016.

That won't work, you should find whoever the product manager responsible for Google Drive sharing is, and start sharing files with them.

Just a simple option like "Allow just my contacts to share files with me". I lost so much time with all the spam and malware that is being sent to me just because my gmail account is so public ... :(

Spammers, scammers, and marketers are abusing every possible system to get eyeballs and it's moved beyond frustrating.

I've had to dump phone numbers due to SMS, voicemail, and phone call spam. My spam box on my e-mail address (not hosted at Google, but still) is littered with bogus calendar invites, fake invoices, file sharing attempts, and so on.

I'm a little surprised spammers aren't putting ad messages in fields that get logged in HTTP access logs just so admins will trip over them somehow.

> I'm a little surprised spammers aren't putting ad messages in fields that get logged in HTTP access logs just so admins will trip over them somehow.

It's been a long time since I last had reason to look at an Apache access.log file, but Referer spam used to be very common (IIRC, the default Apache access.log format logs the content of the Referer header, and analytics reports based on these logs often showed these as live links; it was not rare for these analytics reports to be publicly visible, so these Referer links could be used to spam the Google index).

"referrer" spam has been a thing for a long time!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referrer_spam

They do, I have seen referred field spam, which also appears on analytics suites.

The next hot strategy is reverse-proxying an actual site to grow a domain's position in search engines.

Well there is spamming build logs. If you have used npm enough, you've probably seen someone asking for a job when you run npm i.

This spam is possible from the console.log output of npm packages as they get installed.

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 your 'Shared with Me' menu.

Android needs to default to opt-in notifications like on IOS.

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)

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/

> "9 years with this. This is beyond absurd and stupid. The way it is done now allows a complete stranger to fill my Firebase dashboard with 100 projects and I'm completely helpless. WTF"

Wow.

When people say that Google "doesn't seem to give a shit" about their users, this is what they mean.

IMHO Google drive is one of the worst service of Its kind in the market. Copying, moving duplicating files is as complex and blunt as it could be. Folder duplication doesn’t exist. I’m actually not surprised that sharing is still not fixed. Look at Meet. A service that only after being absolutely beaten by Zoom received some attention. They’re working on bringing Plus back in the form of Currents, but you still cannot stop people from sharing file with you in Google drive...

As a ______ also affected by this issue on my personal Gmail accounts, I've filed a feedback/request for this internally.

I fail to be surprised anymore at the lack of what should be OBVIOUS functionality in some of the largest functionality systems.

Whenever i think I might be stupid for missing what should be obvious functionality I submit a ticket to only realize that the functionality not only doesn't exist but somehow my really basic suggestion is a "unique" or "profound" idea.

Honestly who is hiring these product managers? Who is coming up with these features? Why are what should be no-brainer obvious functionality items missing?

Is there something about product management and design I don't understand? Why is it that you can't get notifications on group calendars or background images on Google docs or lots of other things I'm forgetting now that at the time I was like "wow I can't believe you can't do that"

Didn't google just make everyone jump through hoops on Youtube to ensure all content was safe for children because of COPPA? Does this violate that new law?

im a google one user. & will admit only pay, because it's a steal for the price. no other service offered 100gb for $20 a year.but yeah, google software quality is quite poor. wonder, why all those engineers doing leetcode interviews can't make quality products.

I wish I could use my own domain with GOne.

I'm using GSuite for my private domain after having too much reputations / emails reaching spams issues.

Somehow it was getting worst over the years and 1+ of 10 emails were ending into spam. :(

The same way you get any customer service from Google: Get your post on the front page of HN. This is probably going to get fixed shockingly fast now.

Pretty sure this has hit the front page of HN before...

Love that the only way to get support from Google in 2020 is to post to HN.

From Google's point of view, it probably works as quite an effective filter. If a Google issue has made it to the HN front-page, it's probably worth looking at.

Of course, this doesn't absolve them of the matter of it being the only way to get support.

little side question, whats with these support forums that almost never have real employees answering but have community 'support specialists' that never answer the question and only tell you to use the feedback forms but beg for props on their answers. I don't get it.

Don't be afraid to use that feedback form. You're not required to say nice things on it.

I've always wondered about this - who out there is simping hours of their time for Google, Microsoft etc day in day out? I guess I'm grateful for their existence when I find their 10 year old answer to some weird esoteric thing I'm doing that happens to have worked. But who are these people that are (I presume) working for free to fill in the lack of existence of Google support teams?

Is it possible that someone could share files with someone that is elicit content in order to get them in trouble or to target children's accounts? Seems...like a problem.

Unless the process fails at multiple stages, no. The metadata for who owns a file is not hidden. It's pretty obvious that you get randomly shared a file from someone else. Then again, we've had cases where the process failed at multiple stages before...

I used to have everything google but have slowly moved away from their products because of this exact issue, because of a similar issue with the calendar invites, and because they just abandon their products. What's the point of releasing a brand new product and then releasing no updates? As a developer I love to try new software, but as a regular consumer I just need things to be reliable.

Oh, I was really hoping to see a solution to this. I've been getting an increasing amount of Goole drive spam to the point where every couple hours I'm clearing away notifications for some bullshit that's been shared with me. I haven't even used google drive for like 7 or 8 years.

I'm not sure it makes sense to disable this -- I can only imagine people forgetting they disabled it, then not understanding why they're not getting a family member's folder of photos.

And you can already remove something shared with you by going in Drive to "Shared With Me" and clicking "Remove" in the context menu for the file/folder.

Otherwise, sharing something with a Google account is no different from sending an e-mail, e-mailing a Calendar invite, etc. After all, you can't turn off receiving e-mails or calendar invites.

But, like Gmail, what Drive should have is the ability to block specific sharers.

In the meantime, you can use the "Report abuse/copyright" menu item on any shared item, although I don't know if that helps. :(

I mean usually people tend to send a message or email alongside sharing files with people so I doubt it would be much of a loss.

> 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 right approach here, I think.

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."

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.

It’s amazing how spammers will use every single vector to send stuff to us. I suppose if the cost of sending it is so low they have nothing to lose even when the take up is very low.

Not only that but a new vector is like a gold rush. It's a virus infected a new host that hasn't developed an immune response.

A new vector (probably) hasn't built hardness yet against spam, like for example email with apps like Gmail filtering out most spam and SPF etc.

If you start a forum, you expect spam, and there will be tools in the forum software to deal with it. But something new that isn't a traditional place to spam may be caught off guard.

Yeah you have to assume that if a user can input anything, someone will use it to spam. Text, photos, video, audio... literally any form of user input.

I've recently started getting spam via various service providers' password reset e-mails.

"Hi buy this pill quick and cheap from http://here*, you requested a password reset"

Hhhhhhrrrrgh

Oh wow that's even better than analytics referrer spam.

I suspect there are bots that go looking for forms to fill in without knowing what the context is, i.e. they'll target anything with an input tag.

Right, they can send millions at very little cost... and in some places throughout the world a single successful scam could be equivalent to the average annual income.

I've never had the misfortune of having so many file sharings directed at my gmail, but if it happens to me this is what I'd do:
1) Create a filter to archive all file sharing messages + send to spam folder. You will have to check spam when you're expecting a file share later on though.
2) Turn off Gmail/GDrive notifications on your phone. I'd habitually check my mail regularly anyway. Someone wants me urgently could have a dozen other ways to ping me.

I suspect the reason this stands out is that we normally think of problems in the other direction: someone is able to access something you did not share. In this case, it's being able to access something someone else shared, which AFAIK would often be unsolicited anyway, so the scenario is more like spam than anything related to security.

Another (similar) very irritating thing I've found with Drive is that while there is an option to remove a shared file from your drive (eg. if it's only listed because of link sharing), there are some that (seemingly at random) can't be un-shared.

it's also pretty a bad user experience when you do have a shared link and you want to make a copy(in case the source is deleted), you can't copy the directory, you have to create a new directory and copy those files instead, if your shared link has quite a few sub-folders, you need spend quite a while to do that manual copy.

Similar thing happens with spam calendar invites although I think Google have addressed that now.

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, anything else and then google drive. So I'd like a good alternative to DB that is at least as good as icloud drive (which is not a high bar).

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/

Oh no... shades of RealPlayer.

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

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.

Not affiliated in any way, but we've had good luck with Box.

I'm pretty happy with Google Drive (except for the unwanted filesharing "exploit") and have never liked Dropbox ever

In the spirit of 2020, maybe making the problem worse will ultimately make it better?

> Not fun when my 9 yo son is on my phone...
Well there's your first problem.

I stop it by not using Google in any capacity.

I'll tweet Jeff Dean and see what happens.

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.

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