Google Drive Has a Serious Spam Problem, But Google Says a Fix is Coming (howtogeek.com)

Google Drive has a pretty bad spam problem, and it seems Google doesn't care. Spammers can share files that automatically appear in your Drive, and there's no way to stop it. From a report: Google Drive's sharing system is the problem. Since it doesn't offer any sharing acceptance, all files and folders shared with your account are automatically available to you in Drive -- they just show up. To make matters worse, if you only have "View" permission, you can't remove yourself from the share. It's a mess. And to make matters even worse, this is far from a new problem, but Google still hasn't done anything to fix it.

Google got back to us with a statement saying that changes are coming to Drive's sharing features and they're"making it a priority." Here's the statement in full: "For the vast majority of users, the default sharing permissions in Drive work as intended. Unfortunately, this was not the case for this user and we sincerely apologize for her experience. In light of this issue, we are evaluating changes to our spam, abuse, and blocking features that will prevent this kind of activity from taking place on Drive. In the interim, users who are experiencing similar issues can remove themselves from the folder, and the folder should not reappear in either 'My Drive' or 'Shared with Me' unless they revisit it."

Comments

Google Calendar As Well

[moehoward]

Google Calendar has the same problem. People can just add appointments/tasks to your calendar. Spammers. I'm at a loss as to how they let this happen.

Google Drive permissions are a nightmare.

[jrq]

It's been this way since its inception. The permissions model is awful. For instance, you can assign permissions to users and/or groups. Standard ACL-style permissions, right? But if you and another user to the group, you have to re-share the document/folder with that group, in order for the new user to acquire those permissions. Their suggested solution was to perform this function anytime a group's definition changed. Utterly impractical for groups larger than three, at best.

There cannot have been any security analysis

[gweihir]

Because something like this pops up immediately when you do that analysis competently. Makes me wonder what other severe defects they have in there. Better stay away entirely from this train-wreck.