
Google Drive – How do I stop others from sharing files with me? - mariocesar
https://support.google.com/drive/thread/3708017?hl=en
======
fpgaminer
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

~~~
erichurkman
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.

~~~
WrtCdEvrydy
> 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.

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

~~~
WrtCdEvrydy
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.

~~~
malux85
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.

~~~
tgsovlerkhgsel
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.

------
Wowfunhappy
> 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.

~~~
pedrocx486
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.

~~~
fortran77
Did you tell him? Lots of good music from De bussy

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Debussy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Debussy)

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

~~~
maerF0x0
But one day they will remember the event and think "Dad, You sly dog..."

~~~
organsnyder
And then they'll respect you all the more.

------
SanchoPanda
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](https://support.google.com/drive/thread/3970069?hl=en)

~~~
xtracto
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.

~~~
BbzzbB
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.

~~~
cbo100
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.

~~~
semireg
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.”

~~~
hoistbypetard
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.

------
kstrauser
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?

~~~
manigandham
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.

~~~
kstrauser
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.

~~~
manigandham
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.

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

~~~
manigandham
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.

------
agundy
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.

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

~~~
superkuh
>differentiate mine / shared / someone else's

They're all Google's.

------
schoolornot
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.

~~~
aahhahahaaa
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.

------
cbm-vic-20
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)

~~~
mehrdada
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.

~~~
hn_throwaway_99
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](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.

~~~
mehrdada
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.

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

~~~
mehrdada
"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.

------
mariocesar
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 ... :(

~~~
techsupporter
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.

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

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

------
kwijibob
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.

~~~
dmoose
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.

~~~
kwijibob
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)

------
ramosu
It seems Google simply abandon some of their products.

I've been living with another issue since 2011:
[https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/35889152](https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/35889152)

~~~
jiggawatts
> _" 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.

------
thisbrt
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...

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

------
rexreed
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"

------
ProAm
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?

------
dzonga
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.

~~~
rnotaro
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. :(

------
nikanj
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.

~~~
phendrenad2
Pretty sure this has hit the front page of HN before...

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

~~~
MaxBarraclough
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.

------
dawnerd
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.

~~~
komali2
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?

------
partiallypro
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.

~~~
viraptor
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...

------
ibdf
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.

------
grawprog
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.

------
crazygringo
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. :(

~~~
philsnow
> 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.

~~~
crazygringo
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.

~~~
llama9000
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."

------
jennyyang
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.

------
JamesBaxter
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.

~~~
quickthrower2
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.

~~~
aahhahahaaa
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.

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

"Hi _buy this pill quick and cheap from[http://here*](http://here*), you
requested a password reset"

Hhhhhhrrrrgh

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

~~~
quickthrower2
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.

------
llama9000
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.

------
userbinator
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.

------
Jap2-0
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.

------
ausjke
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.

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

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

~~~
foobiekr
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).

~~~
Simulacra
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.

~~~
encom
[https://owncloud.org/](https://owncloud.org/)

------
throwaway29102
In the spirit of 2020, maybe making the problem worse will ultimately make it
better?

------
shadowgovt
> Not fun when my 9 yo son is on my phone...

Well there's your first problem.

------
StanislavPetrov
I stop it by not using Google in any capacity.

------
IOT_Apprentice
I'll tweet Jeff Dean and see what happens.

------
aaron695
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.

~~~
ezrast
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.

~~~
aaron695
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.

