There's no way to report spam on Google Drive | Hacker News Reader

There's no way to report spam on Google Drive

shkspr.mobi

324 pointsedent100 comments

I also have been receiving lots of these lately. I don't understand why "blocking everyone that's not in your contact list" is not a feature.

This thread below on Google Drive Help Center was closed with a response that you can now block a specific user — which is useless against a horde of bots.

https://support.google.com/drive/thread/58636526/how-to-bloc...

Yep, I even tried to ask a very similar question with the very first sentence outlining I was aware you could block singular users but it's useless against hordes of bots, same response: https://support.google.com/drive/thread/142587006?hl=en

It's the best response we have at the moment, please send in-product feedback and report such files.

Why? That just wastes everyone time. It clearly doesn't help solve the problem.

Are you more interested in fixing a process or fixing the problem?

Sending in-product feedback certainly could work because it's more likely to be seen by product management as it continues to roll in.

Support-driven product change requests are well intentioned but generally break down as a process internally. The working knowledge base and incentives are not properly aligned.

> Sending in-product feedback certainly could work

If it could work, we would have seen that happening. We have not, so we must assume it can't. Thus, asking to "send feedback in-product" is just a way to waste everyone's time. You avoid the negative stigma that is associated with knowing a problem exists and ignoring it, without having to undertake any concrete action. Corporate spin at it's finest.

I'm getting these recently too as Android notifications. It's very annoying and could be very unprofessional or hard-to-explain if one came in at the wrong time.

Me too, although FWIW on Android I opened Drive, then to "Settings" under the hamburger menu, then "Notification Settings", then I unchecked the "Shared items" notifications.

That may not work for you if you want shared item notifications, but I already get bombarded by a million different notifications for everything (sometimes I hate the modern world) and I sure as hell don't want shared item notifications - if something is important enough that I should read it, the person who shared it to me will email me about it.

I've been asking blocking feature since Gmail started inviting for beta testing. I'm one of the early Gmail testers. From day 1 I registered, I started received spams and I asked again and again, the response had always been non-sense like "our spam filters are good enough, you don't need to block anyone yourself". Really? So I never used Gmail as my primary email address. And this thing should be based on the exactly the same sh*tty logic. Never mind, I'm on the verge to ditch Google.

I don't see any way to block users through the Android app.

On a file within the Shared section, click the three dots to the right, block should be the last option.

There actually is, it's just stupidly hidden: https://matthewminer.name/blog/how-to-report-this-google-dri...

That's amazing! Thank you. I've no idea why Google "support" can't tell people that.

They may not know.

503 error, must be busy now. I don't have this problem since I don't use Drive, but my guess is - whatever is on your page - it's worth a separate post.

Not only is there no way to report spam on Google Drive, I noticed in the past few months that Google have also started refusing spam reports via SpamCop. Now those reports just go to google-abuse-bounces-reports@devnull[0].

I suppose relative to their market size one could make an argument that they are doing a good job of “only” being the source of ~1.8% of all spam[1], and who knows what they did with these reports to begin with, but the intentional deterioration of reporting capability isn’t a great look, and there’s no effective recourse since they are too big to block outright.

[0] https://www.spamcop.net/w3m?action=inprogress

[1] https://www.spamcop.net/hoshame.shtml

Turns out there is a way to report it, it's just incredibly convoluted. Check the post above yours.

It would be consistent with criminal monopoly behavior if Google's next step was to start charging us for submitting spam reports... watch this space

Watch this space? Do you know where you are? You already can't edit this post, what are we watching for exactly

I've had to disable all notifications from Google Drive because of this, which only started happening recently.

Whatever Google did to make it easy for random spammers or new/bot accounts to indiscriminately spam unrelated accounts is causing distrust & will end up with lower usage as a result.

I use a notification filter to block notifications from Google Drive with :rose: or :heart_eyes:. No more Google Drive spam on my phone. Unfortunately, there is no browser extension API for reading all notifications, as far as I can tell, so the only way to make it stop in my desktop web browser is to write a monkey patching extension for it, which is enough trouble that I haven't gotten around to doing it yet.

Just blocking notifications from Google Drive and complaining on the Play Store is the right thing.

What is a norification filter? An Android app? Do you need root?

Filter box for Android is one. No root necessary.

You can disable notifications just for Shared Items.

drive>menu>settings>notification settings>notification categories>shared items

Yeah there's been a noticeable uptick in Google Drive spam on Android. Sexy lady stuff, junk like work PowerPoint attachment, all kinds of spam.

> Sexy lady stuff

I have this all over YouTube, togeter with dubious "phone cleaners" and the whole range of probably malware and backdoor infested app garbage.

Funny thing is: After reporting probably too much of those ads on YT, I can no longer report _any_ ad at all.

Banned from the report function. wtf.

"our metrics for how many bad ads we're serving goes down after we block users from reporting it."

-machine learning algoritum somewhere

I recall something similar occurring during my earlier CS:GO days. I was temp-banned for reporting/ attempting to vote out too many cheaters. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Instagram and similar can outright ban you for reporting spam. I guess spam reporting is also abused and brings you into a radar you weren't previously in.

Nuts.

Instagram has a serious "follow spam". Clearly fake accounts will follow people who follows some kind of niche account with hopes that people will follow back. It works, I can see that those spam-accounts have real followers.

It tried to report those accounts to Instagram, and they don't care (the @spamaccount doesn't violate any ToS). So now I just block.

This is apparently a problem on Reddit too. I got some follow spam over the weekend which was just trying to get me to click porn links. No way to report.

There's no point in reporting spam, just setup an adblocker in general and move on.

Ads on CNN AMP pages cover content, and there is no way to see the text underneath when using Chrome. So many reports, and nothing happens. Luckily Firefox lets me block the ads.

The past couple weeks I've received at least 5 notifications like this and found the lack of "report spam"/"block sender" functionality surprising. I submitted feedback through the app but I have little confidence that anyone is actually looking at those - I've always seen Google's feedback submission on Android as a b*tch abyss. For now I've just blocked all Drive notifications.

Google does not care that much. It's not a high priory for them evidently. reporting blog spam takes forever too. It goes into a batch that may eventually be processed.

Not a day goes by without a post on how crappy Google is at support or fixing problems or ignoring the public at large. "Don't Be Evil" (if that was ever a thing) is now "Don't Give A Shit (At Scale)".

If Google is so large that it cannot manage even something as basic as spam, perhaps it is too big to exist?

That's always been a problem with using a huge company as your provider: you're effectively meaningless to it unless you're on the top of some huge organization like the US Army. If you can decide whether tens of millions of USD get spent or not then miracles can happen. If you're the average joe worth $20 of business to the company, or worse, pay by watching ads, then you can be sent off to the self-support chat bot and otherwise ignored.

If you need a service of any complexity, and want to have your personal interests taken into account, you're best going with some medium size company -- large enough to be staffed by competent people, but small enough that they still fear bad PR and people going with the competition.

Disagree strongly.

I'm naturally averse to "huge companies" but Amazon does customer support fantastically well.

If Amazon can do it, and do it very well, so can Google.

They just choose not to. And so I choose not to use them.

Maybe I'm not their target audience.

Which Amazon? The online shopping? Yeah, that one's easy because good customer support is mostly taking your side unless you're being abusive, and because in reality most returns get thrown out anyway. Amazon shopping is also highly profitable. They're not scrounging cents they get from you watching ads.

AWS? You get no tech support without paying for it as far as I can tell. Pay $29/month minimum if you want to open tickets.

Fair enough. But if that is the case and that is the cost of good support (tbc) then pay it.

Nothing is worse than signing up for a service where support may be needed but is somehow lacking or not even available.

Amazon "support" is just giving you back some of the money you gave them, and maybe even taking it from someone else. Google does that too, trivially, because you aren't giving them money.

They don't do anything to stop spamming fraudulent counterfeit products.

99% of the spam email I've been getting has been using using static redirect sites hosted on GCS to try to get past spam filters too. I've tried reporting it via https://support.google.com/code/contact/cloud_platform_repor... but it's pretty exhausting.

I'm a Xoogler and one of the Twitter users included in this OP.

A few interesting things here; reporting flow is terrible. You have to open the (porn/dangerous) on Google Drive in mobile, then on desktop open it in recent, then go to Help > Report Abuse/Copyright

example link (NSFW!!) https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ftlYcB4sY7FLj_1WHkoS7Jd2... - links to rju2.all444link.com (many of these are using all444link.com) - last edit (shown on mobile only) was from ratchaneekorn_spk@spk.ac.th - abuse report link is at https://docs.google.com/u/0/abuse?id=1ftlYcB4sY7FLj_1WHkoS7J... with clear link structure

Every single one of these spam pages was A) advertising porn, B) using all444link.com, and C) was from a user at a Thai educational domain name (different hosts, though).

It's not a high priory for Google stopping spam, same for all major tech companies. Their framing of this is that they are not the internet's babysitters. An assumption is users bear some responsibility for not being scammed or it's not profitable for them to invest lots of resources into stopping spam. ISPs are somewhat different in that customers are paying and ISPs bear a greater cost, so they tend to take spam more aggressively.

They're maybe not the internet's "babysitters", but they are the "babysitters" of their own network infrastructure and services, and these spammer scum do abuse that infrastructure and waste/steal bandwidth and other resource that don't belong to them. You'd think Google would want to put a stop to that when it's gotten to a point where it's happening "at scale" and wasting large enough amounts of resource that it starts to equate to real-world dollars being lost/wasted. Sure, users bear some responsibility for not being scammed, but that doesn't mean that Google has to tolerate it happening through their services and infrastructure, especially not when their own end user license agreements for those services actively prohibit such usage.

That is the problem. google does not deem this spam that is on their platform to be enough of a cost to justify trying doing more to stop it. It's a basic cost-benefit analysis.

Are you confusing google drive spam with email spam? In this case Google is the ISP- as the article said, the Google Drive App is sending notifications to people for this spam. People's local ISPs have literally nothing to do with this at all.

Earthlink takes spam way more seriously than google because EarthLink has paying customers. Most people who use google products do not pay. Google is not going to invest millions of stopping spam if there is no financial reason to do so. That is the cold reality of cost-benefit analysis. There would have to be some legislation or legal precedent in which google is forced to do something.

Google has paying customers for its office suite. They charge for individuals storage beyond the free tier, and their business users pay a per user fee.

And those customers have the right to send porn spam.

It is a degradation of their service. They absolutely should care.

Okay so bear with me. My local carwash has a legitimate crazy person there who tries to sell his flat-earth pamphlets. The carwash tries to chase him away, not because they're the street's "baby sitter", but because he's bad for business. People could go get a car wash elsewhere. People could store their files elsewhere.

Let's assume the carwash has thousands of very expensive customers who generate billions of dollars for it, and many more cheaper customers that generate much less or nothing. And the crazy person is hassling some of the non-paying customers, but it costs google $1000/day to stop him, because he's very persistent. Is it worth google paying $1000/day to protect those non-paying customers or help those expensive customers?

Yeah that's my point, being the babysitter of your platform is sometimes cost-effective, and sometimes not.

>They are not the internet's babysitters

This kind of attitude is why we're all enduring nonstop spam calls.

Contra the point of this thread, Google actually prevents me from getting basically any spam calls.

With the combination of Google Fi and Pixel, I receive very few spam calls. Almost all of them are automatically screened, the phone never rings, and I'm left with a "spam notification," with a transcript of the call asking me to extend my warranty.

Similarly, essentially all spam text messages are identified as spam, and generate only a silent notification.

For the few spam calls that slip through, it's one click to screen the call with Google Assistant.

It's still in google's best interest that someone can use their phones without being spammed by porn ads or blocking Drive notifications.

> Thai educational domain name

Aka a (hacked?) paying customer who it is more trustworthy than you, a mere innocent user.

I'm having the same issue... Google is not helping.. ¿any solution to this?

In recent days i also started receiving those. I don't get how Google manages to do something this stupid. I was considering switching to iphone. This case improved odds of it.

I have also switched to iphone to a better quality of e-life, but you need to avoid using anything google related altogether , at a certain point google services are not something they sell or make business with, their job is to show you advertisement and spam, so the rest is just a side gig to better do their primary thing, so one is better off just avoiding them, these replies in the post are just as pathetic as the company itself, people always report these spam (this is not the first post about it, there was also a guy a while ago who had a fight with his wife because of the sudden spam on google drive), it's just PR

I've been receiving these on my iPhone (via Google Drive app) with no real recourse. This problem isn't limited to Android users.

My complain was about this policy let this happen. Obviously in a company like Google there should be company wise rule which won't let a stranger able to send notification to my phone.

Strangers have always been able to cause notifications to appear on your phone - notifications for SMS, social media, calls, email etc can all originate from people you don't know.

With my permission though. Those are expected and under my control. But in this situation it is not even expected to stranger to be able to share files with me and notify me. I dont even receive e mail for that instead direct notification to my phone. Spam is not problem for me. What bothers me is just this stupidity comes from Google which unfortunately i rely on too much by using android.

Decent services allow you to whitelist those you want to allow to notify you. One of many reasons I don't use Google Drive or any Google product.

I’m confused. Most of the tweets in the article have a response from Google directing the user how to report these as abuse spam from within google drive and docs. https://support.google.com/docs/answer/2463296?hl=en (After removing everyone’s link shortner. Granted I couldn’t find the time in the iOS client and am not at my desktop to check there.

Edit: ignore me I see the issue is there is no way to block the notifications on mobile and since these don’t show up on desktop they can’t be responded to in any reasonable way there either.

Social networks, google is the greatest gift to scammers and spammers ever. By the time the scam or spam is stopped, the profit has been realized. Spam prevention is always reactive, not proactive, giving scammers an advantage. Algos are too slow to stop a smart spammer, companies do not care that much unless the media brings it to their attention or they get sued.

I'm at least glad to see I'm not the only one. This has been a bit frustrating the last couple weeks. I was wondering where I had used my Google drive account that suddenly I was getting hit with them

Ditto! I was sure I had accidentally changed some Google setting, and the Drive spam irritated me to no end. I'm so glad to be gradually downscaling my Google dependency. What a ridiculous company!

Little things like this helped me give up on Google.

Just ... rubbish.

They're basically a showcase of technology.

Impressive if they can keep the flywheel turning without giving a ... for the everyday people they once pretended to serve.

What legitimate user shares GD files with emojis in the document name?

I'll guess that you have no daughters / granddaughters old enough to use social media much?

Google Drive doesn't feel like frequently used social media tool. Maybe I am out of the loop.

Kids with access to GDocs use it for real-time chat. It's like the old talk(1) program but with rich text!

they are not saying that Google Drive is a social media tool. they are saying that if you have children who are of a certain age (the age being old enough to use social media), then they are likely to use emojis in other avenues

As far as I can tell, Google does not actually care that its platforms are used for abuse.

You can report spam from gmail accounts, but if you do you just get even more spam. Gmail appears to pass your complaint onto the spammer, who now has a verified email address to spam more. Though the spammer might have to get yet another gmail account first.

There's PhishTank.[1]

[1] https://www.phishtank.com/phish_detail.php?phish_id=6178855

Is GDrive really that much better than OneDrive? I couldn’t imaging relying on their office tools. I have a paid 365 family plan for personal use.

Would love to know why Google Public DNS is responding SERVFAIL on this domain. Everyone else can resolve it :-/

It's working for me.

  $ host shkspr.mobi 8.8.8.8
  Using domain server:
  Name: 8.8.8.8
  Address: 8.8.8.8#53
  Aliases: 

  shkspr.mobi has address 77.72.0.226

Weird because even Google's own DNS query UI says it is SERVFAIL:

https://dns.google/query?name=shkspr.mobi

  "Status": 2 /* SERVFAIL */,
  "TC": false,
  "RD": true,
  "RA": true,
  "AD": false,
  "CD": false,
  "Question": [
    {
      "name": "shkspr.mobi.",
      "type": 1 /* A */
    }
  ],
  "Comment": "Resolution failure. Please check https://intodns.com/shkspr.mobi"

Even weirder, works for me... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

https://dns.google/resolve?name=shkspr.mobi&type=A

{"Status":0,"TC":false,"RD":true,"RA":true,"AD":false,"CD":false,"Question":[{"name":"shkspr.mobi.","type":1}],"Answer":[{"name":"shkspr.mobi.","type":1,"TTL":14400,"data":"77.72.0.226"}],"Comment":"Response from 139.162.230.184."}

I uninstalled the Android app. One less piece of polluting garbage.

Have you all been getting the videos I shared with you? :lips:

I also have seen that when I go to look at at in on my laptop the file isn't actually there. And that is supposedly the only way to report it as spam, so its unclear if Google is actually catching it as spam or not.

My guess was that when this happened to me, it meant that Google had figured out it was spam after the notification got through, likely due to people marking it as spam. So I got the notifications, but the files had gone away before I looked.

Use the mobile feedback form.

Where is that? I don't see it in the Android app.

in case anyone is wondering:

- Open the app, and select the 'Shared' folder at the bottom

- Find the spam content, click the three dots to open a menu

- At the bottom, hit 'Report abuse', select an option, and confirm.

So far, I've only been able to do this one-by-one, though I receive a couple of these shared docs every day.

That only works if the document is still shared with you. If the spammers are halfway clever, they're removing access immediately after granting it, so the victim can't actually open the document to report it as abusive.

But what would be the point of doing that? They can't sell you whatever it is they're trying to sell unless you open the doc.

Users who actually click links in the document are clustered towards early openers? Share doc for two minutes, collect clicks, unshare to cut off spam reports.

I received a lot of spam share notifications on Google Drive, and there is no spam in the Shared with Me view in the app. I don't know what their game is, but this is happening. It also doesn't make sense that Google Drive doesn't remove the notification after the file is no longer shared with me.

block the world, allow friends with a pw like their initials - lengthen as needed. This is an invasion by homeless bots, one-at-a-time blocking = they outnumber you. Add the access PW to your signature as PW = your initials, or your initials twice/thrice in case bots surface. This is OK for families or small crews where the PW rules can be uniquely changed case by case. For bulk, we will all have to go to the new FIDO protocol which seems to be gaining traction. https://fidoalliance.org/tag/new-fido-protocol/

OK, but how do I do that on Google Drive?

Who has access? I have sent files via GD to people, adding names as needed. Have you granted open access to anyone at all? Not using GD more than once a month, I have not seen any spam, so I am a GD newb?

This is not about protecting the files you share, it's about spammers abusing the file sharing mechanism to send you notifications. THEY share a file with you in order to trigger a notification and there's no way to block this.

Ah, I see. Have never got one, fingers crossed. I am not a big user...

Based on the content in the article, you don't have to be a heavy user of Google Drive to see this sort of spam, nor do you have to send anyone files.

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