Cloud storage services such as Google Drive have become, for some time now, not only a solution that we use to save certain files, either because we want to protect them more or because we want to have access to them from any device and at any time (as long as we have an Internet connection, of course). As I said, we not only use them for this purpose, although in many cases it is the main one, they are also an excellent tool for sharing files with third parties.
Either to share a large file (that therefore you could not send as an attachment in an email) with one person, to send a multiple file to many people in a more comfortable way or a combination of both, the possibility offered by services such as Google Drive to generate a url with which to share any file that we have stored in the cloud, is (at least in my opinion) the most comfortable and fastest system available today.
So much so that even webmail services, such as Gmail, when you try to attach a file that is too large, will tell you that it is not possible to send it that way, but they offer to upload it to their online storage service, Google Drive in this case, to share it that way. Thus, it is normal that sharing through this medium has become so popular for some time now, to the point that we can even find people who share many files, and that for this purpose multiple accounts are created in these services.
The problem is that, of course, this can be used to share legitimate files, yes, but also others a little less virtuous: spam, malware, content protected by copyright … yes, services like Google Drive have also become the warehouse and distribution system used to share digital assets that, at least according to Google’s policies regarding its service, should not be shared from its platform. And it finally looks like they’re going to get serious about it.
So far the company itself has not applied much control in this regard, and has only responded to requests from third parties. However, and as we can read on his blog, Google Drive will soon begin to restrict access to files that it believes violate these policies, in addition to starting to take active measures for the identification of said type of files. And when will this feature begin to roll out? Well, in fact, it has already done so, its activation began on December 14, so the first positives will have already occurred, and we can expect them to become widespread in a matter of weeks.
Those files that violate company policies will be marked as such and their sharing will automatically be disabled, that is, even if it has already been shared with other people, either directly from Google Drive or through a link, it will no longer be possible to access it, except for its owner, who will also see a visual warning of said circumstance, as well as a An explanation of what caused the crash, that is, what rule violates that file.
Obviously, the company is counting on that its detection system is not perfect and, consequently, has enabled a function with which we can report a false positive. In this case, yes, the file will have to be checked by a Google Drive review team, which will determine if the file really violates the service’s policies or, on the contrary, an error has occurred, in which case it will be restored the ability to share it through the service.
