We love Google Drive at Ausdroid and use it for most everything; from sharing story drafts with each other, to storing scans of important documents, through to collaborating on longer form content, Google Drive is a journalist’s dream.
Google Drive is, in fact, just as useful for pretty much every other user, business and more .. but one thing hurts it. Spam.
Spam has been a problem with Drive for some time, and like email spam, all that’s needed for someone to fill your Drive with crap is your email address. Anyone can share files with you as long as they have your email. Worse, you can’t fully remove those files from your Drive.
You can hide them, sure, but they still show up in search and elsewhere. It’s annoying, and for some users, it can be a major problem. Fortunately, 9to5Google reports that Google’s about to do something about it:
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.
A Google spokesperson gave this statement above, showing that Google is serious about making changes to avoid spam in future. Because Drive spam circumvents the excellent spam protection in Gmail, it’s an area in desperate need of improvement.
