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

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&#x27;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&#x27;d get lovely &quot;eat my pussy&quot; events popping up on your calendar and reminders.<p>Thanks Google, you&#x27;re the best &#x2F;s

&gt; Keep getting spam shared on an account I don&#x27;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 &quot;eat my pussy baby&quot;. Google needs to address this.<p>Oh. That&#x27;s bad.

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.<p>They don&#x27;t even have an option to show you how much space folders take up, when they charge you based on space usage.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.google.com&#x2F;drive&#x2F;thread&#x2F;3970069?hl=en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.google.com&#x2F;drive&#x2F;thread&#x2F;3970069?hl=en</a>

My adventures last week:<p>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.<p>Answer 1: Run this report to get a list of every document shared with them. Manually visit each document and un-share it.<p>Answer 2: Our API docs are at...<p>FFS, Google. I really don&#x27;t think this is that unusual of a request. I refuse to believe that we&#x27;re the first company ever that wanted to remove people from our Google Drive. Why do you make it so difficult?

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

Tangential to this is that calendar&#x2F;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.

Answer: find the email address of the person the product manager of Google Drive reports to, and start sharing stuff with them.<p>(&#x2F;s: not condoning doxxing here)

Just a simple option like &quot;Allow just my contacts to share files with me&quot;. 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 ... :(

I&#x27;m all in on GDrive - my whole world is in there. 25 years of files.<p>I do notice Spam occasionally in the &#x27;shared with me&#x27; menu - but it seems to get cleaned up.<p>I already have all 99% notifications turned off in apps.<p>Sounds like the real annoying part is getting the notification with the spammy sexual titles.<p>If you didn&#x27;t get notifications then likely the spam detection would delete before you ever noticed it in your &#x27;Shared with Me&#x27; menu.<p>Android needs to default to opt-in notifications like on IOS.

It seems Google simply abandon some of their products.<p>I&#x27;ve been living with another issue since 2011: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;issuetracker.google.com&#x2F;issues&#x2F;35889152" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;issuetracker.google.com&#x2F;issues&#x2F;35889152</a>

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&#x27;ve filed a feedback&#x2F;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.<p>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&#x27;t exist but somehow my really basic suggestion is a &quot;unique&quot; or &quot;profound&quot; idea.<p>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?<p>Is there something about product management and design I don&#x27;t understand? Why is it that you can&#x27;t get notifications on group calendars or background images on Google docs or lots of other things I&#x27;m forgetting now that at the time I was like &quot;wow I can&#x27;t believe you can&#x27;t do that&quot;

Didn&#x27;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. &amp; will admit only pay, because it&#x27;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&#x27;t make quality products.

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.

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

little side question, whats with these support forums that almost never have real employees answering but have community &#x27;support specialists&#x27; that never answer the question and only tell you to use the feedback forms but beg for props on their answers. I don&#x27;t get it.

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&#x27;s accounts? Seems...like a problem.

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&#x27;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&#x27;ve been getting an increasing amount of Goole drive spam to the point where every couple hours I&#x27;m clearing away notifications for some bullshit that&#x27;s been shared with me. I haven&#x27;t even used google drive for like 7 or 8 years.

I&#x27;m not sure it makes sense to <i>disable</i> this -- I can only imagine people forgetting they disabled it, then not understanding why they&#x27;re not getting a family member&#x27;s folder of photos.<p>And you can already remove something shared with you by going in Drive to &quot;Shared With Me&quot; and clicking &quot;Remove&quot; in the context menu for the file&#x2F;folder.<p>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&#x27;t turn off receiving e-mails or calendar invites.<p>But, like Gmail, what Drive <i>should</i> have is the ability to block specific sharers.<p>In the meantime, you can use the &quot;Report abuse&#x2F;copyright&quot; menu item on any shared item, although I don&#x27;t know if that helps. :(

The only reason why this hasn&#x27;t been fixed is because even with this bug, people continue to keep using the product. So why bother fixing it?<p>The only way to get Google to respond is to stop using their products. That&#x27;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.

I&#x27;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&#x27;d do:<p>1) Create a filter to archive all file sharing messages + send to spam folder. You will have to check spam when you&#x27;re expecting a file share later on though.<p>2) Turn off Gmail&#x2F;GDrive notifications on your phone. I&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;ve found with Drive is that while there is an option to remove a shared file from your drive (eg. if it&#x27;s only listed because of link sharing), there are some that (seemingly at random) can&#x27;t be un-shared.

it&#x27;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&#x27;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.

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

&gt; Not fun when my 9 yo son is on my phone...<p>Well there&#x27;s your first problem.

I stop it by not using Google in any capacity.

I&#x27;ll tweet Jeff Dean and see what happens.

I don&#x27;t think people here get this is a fundamental internet spam problem not solved with a button.<p>Any solution to this, should work equally well with email and vice versa.