Slashdot Mirror
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."
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."
is that despite their promises, after 6 years there still isn't a google provided linux client.
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.
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
Google lets spam emails through. And even if they identify it as spam and filter it into my spam folder, if it has a calendar invite, google goes ahead and adds it to my calendar.
Jeezus H Christ, google, connect the fucking dots.
Oh, I know. It's free. And I'm the product.
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.
My UID is prime!
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.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Then it is an arms race. All shared documents are associated with accounts. They can throttle down how much sharing you can do to young accounts. For older accounts they can build links of shared documents and shared editing history. With some amount of AI thrown, they can cut down a lot of spam.
Gmail is pretty good in filtering out spam. Google phone is pretty good in marking incoming calls as possible spam. So they will probably have a more sophisticated way than what a random guy like me posts after two minutes of thinking.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact