[HN Gopher] There's no way to report spam on Google Drive
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There's no way to report spam on Google Drive
Author : edent
Score : 233 points
Date : 2022-04-04 11:54 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (shkspr.mobi)
(TXT) w3m dump (shkspr.mobi)
| paulpauper wrote:
| Social networks, google is the greatest gift to scammers and
| spammers ever. By the time the scam or spam is stopped, the
| profit has been realized. Spam prevention is always reactive, not
| proactive, giving scammers an advantage. Algos are too slow to
| stop a smart spammer, companies do not care that much unless the
| media brings it to their attention or they get sued.
| dr_orpheus wrote:
| I also have seen that when I go to look at at in on my laptop the
| file isn't actually there. And that is supposedly the only way to
| report it as spam, so its unclear if Google is actually catching
| it as spam or not.
| uranium wrote:
| My guess was that when this happened to me, it meant that
| Google had figured out it was spam after the notification got
| through, likely due to people marking it as spam. So I got the
| notifications, but the files had gone away before I looked.
| amichal wrote:
| I'm confused. Most of the tweets in the article have a response
| from Google directing the user how to report these as abuse spam
| from within google drive and docs.
| https://support.google.com/docs/answer/2463296?hl=en (After
| removing everyone's link shortner. Granted I couldn't find the
| time in the iOS client and am not at my desktop to check there.
|
| Edit: ignore me I see the issue is there is no way to block the
| notifications on mobile and since these don't show up on desktop
| they can't be responded to in any reasonable way there either.
| mminer237 wrote:
| There actually is, it's just stupidly hidden:
| https://matthewminer.name/blog/how-to-report-this-google-dri...
| rambambram wrote:
| 503 error, must be busy now. I don't have this problem since I
| don't use Drive, but my guess is - whatever is on your page -
| it's worth a separate post.
| edent wrote:
| That's amazing! Thank you. I've no idea why Google "support"
| can't tell people that.
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| As far as I can tell, Google does not actually care that its
| platforms are used for abuse.
|
| You can report spam from gmail accounts, but if you do you just
| get even more spam. Gmail appears to pass your complaint onto the
| spammer, who now has a verified email address to spam more.
| Though the spammer might have to get yet another gmail account
| first.
| mc4ndr3 wrote:
| Use the mobile feedback form.
| edent wrote:
| Where is that? I don't see it in the Android app.
| waserwill wrote:
| in case anyone is wondering:
|
| - Open the app, and select the 'Shared' folder at the bottom
|
| - Find the spam content, click the three dots to open a menu
|
| - At the bottom, hit 'Report abuse', select an option, and
| confirm.
|
| So far, I've only been able to do this one-by-one, though I
| receive a couple of these shared docs every day.
| duskwuff wrote:
| That only works if the document is still shared with you.
| If the spammers are halfway clever, they're removing access
| immediately after granting it, so the victim can't actually
| open the document to report it as abusive.
| thematrixturtle wrote:
| But what would be the point of doing that? They can't
| sell you whatever it is they're trying to sell unless you
| open the doc.
| tedunangst wrote:
| Users who actually click links in the document are
| clustered towards early openers? Share doc for two
| minutes, collect clicks, unshare to cut off spam reports.
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| I received a lot of spam share notifications on Google
| Drive, and there is no spam in the Shared with Me view in
| the app. I don't know what their game is, but this is
| happening. It also doesn't make sense that Google Drive
| doesn't remove the notification after the file is no
| longer shared with me.
| zarmin wrote:
| Have you all been getting the videos I shared with you? :lips:
| mrlatinos wrote:
| The past couple weeks I've received at least 5 notifications like
| this and found the lack of "report spam"/"block sender"
| functionality surprising. I submitted feedback through the app
| but I have little confidence that anyone is actually looking at
| those - I've always seen Google's feedback submission on Android
| as a b*tch abyss. For now I've just blocked all Drive
| notifications.
| paulpauper wrote:
| Google does not care that much. It's not a high priory for them
| evidently. reporting blog spam takes forever too. It goes into
| a batch that may eventually be processed.
| HNHatesUsers wrote:
| alienalp wrote:
| In recent days i also started receiving those. I don't get how
| Google manages to do something this stupid. I was considering
| switching to iphone. This case improved odds of it.
| trampish wrote:
| I've been receiving these on my iPhone (via Google Drive app)
| with no real recourse. This problem isn't limited to Android
| users.
| alienalp wrote:
| My complain was about this policy let this happen. Obviously
| in a company like Google there should be company wise rule
| which won't let a stranger able to send notification to my
| phone.
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| I have also switched to iphone to a better quality of e-life,
| but you need to avoid using anything google related altogether
| , at a certain point google services are not something they
| sell or make business with, their job is to show you
| advertisement and spam, so the rest is just a side gig to
| better do their primary thing, so one is better off just
| avoiding them, these replies in the post are just as pathetic
| as the company itself, people always report these spam (this is
| not the first post about it, there was also a guy a while ago
| who had a fight with his wife because of the sudden spam on
| google drive), it's just PR
| coldcode wrote:
| Not a day goes by without a post on how crappy Google is at
| support or fixing problems or ignoring the public at large.
| "Don't Be Evil" (if that was ever a thing) is now "Don't Give A
| Shit (At Scale)".
|
| If Google is so large that it cannot manage even something as
| basic as spam, perhaps it is too big to exist?
| dale_glass wrote:
| That's always been a problem with using a huge company as your
| provider: you're effectively meaningless to it unless you're on
| the top of some huge organization like the US Army. If you can
| decide whether tens of millions of USD get spent or not then
| miracles can happen. If you're the average joe worth $20 of
| business to the company, or worse, pay by watching ads, then
| you can be sent off to the self-support chat bot and otherwise
| ignored.
|
| If you need a service of any complexity, and want to have your
| personal interests taken into account, you're best going with
| some medium size company -- large enough to be staffed by
| competent people, but small enough that they still fear bad PR
| and people going with the competition.
| LightG wrote:
| Disagree strongly.
|
| I'm naturally averse to "huge companies" but Amazon does
| customer support fantastically well.
|
| If Amazon can do it, and do it very well, so can Google.
|
| They just choose not to. And so I choose not to use them.
|
| Maybe I'm not their target audience.
| dale_glass wrote:
| Which Amazon? The online shopping? Yeah, that one's easy
| because good customer support is mostly taking your side
| unless you're being abusive, and because in reality most
| returns get thrown out anyway. Amazon shopping is also
| highly profitable. They're not scrounging cents they get
| from you watching ads.
|
| AWS? You get no tech support without paying for it as far
| as I can tell. Pay $29/month minimum if you want to open
| tickets.
| aurizon wrote:
| block the world, allow friends with a pw like their initials -
| lengthen as needed. This is an invasion by homeless bots, one-at-
| a-time blocking = they outnumber you. Add the access PW to your
| signature as PW = your initials, or your initials twice/thrice in
| case bots surface. This is OK for families or small crews where
| the PW rules can be uniquely changed case by case. For bulk, we
| will all have to go to the new FIDO protocol which seems to be
| gaining traction. https://fidoalliance.org/tag/new-fido-protocol/
| edent wrote:
| OK, but how do I do that on Google Drive?
| aurizon wrote:
| Who has access? I have sent files via GD to people, adding
| names as needed. Have you granted open access to anyone at
| all? Not using GD more than once a month, I have not seen any
| spam, so I am a GD newb?
| notreallyserio wrote:
| Based on the content in the article, you don't have to be a
| heavy user of Google Drive to see this sort of spam, nor do
| you have to send anyone files.
| bonobo wrote:
| This is not about protecting the files you share, it's
| about spammers abusing the file sharing mechanism to send
| you notifications. THEY share a file with you in order to
| trigger a notification and there's no way to block this.
| aurizon wrote:
| Ah, I see. Have never got one, fingers crossed. I am not
| a big user...
| bonobo wrote:
| I also have been receiving lots of these lately. I don't
| understand why "blocking everyone that's not in your contact
| list" is not a feature.
|
| This thread below on Google Drive Help Center was closed with a
| response that you can now block a specific user -- which is
| useless against a horde of bots.
|
| https://support.google.com/drive/thread/58636526/how-to-bloc...
| mrlatinos wrote:
| I don't see any way to block users through the Android app.
| maps7 wrote:
| I'm getting these recently too as Android notifications. It's
| very annoying and could be very unprofessional or hard-to-
| explain if one came in at the wrong time.
| mossity wrote:
| 99% of the spam email I've been getting has been using using
| static redirect sites hosted on GCS to try to get past spam
| filters too. I've tried reporting it via
| https://support.google.com/code/contact/cloud_platform_repor...
| but it's pretty exhausting.
| mythz wrote:
| I've had to disable all notifications from Google Drive because
| of this, which only started happening recently.
|
| Whatever Google did to make it easy for random spammers or
| new/bot accounts to indiscriminately spam unrelated accounts is
| causing distrust & will end up with lower usage as a result.
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| I use a notification filter to block notifications from Google
| Drive with :rose: or :heart_eyes:. No more Google Drive spam on
| my phone. Unfortunately, there is no browser extension API for
| reading all notifications, as far as I can tell, so the only
| way to make it stop in my desktop web browser is to write a
| monkey patching extension for it, which is enough trouble that
| I haven't gotten around to doing it yet.
|
| Just blocking notifications from Google Drive and complaining
| on the Play Store is the right thing.
| scrumbledober wrote:
| I'm at least glad to see I'm not the only one. This has been a
| bit frustrating the last couple weeks. I was wondering where I
| had used my Google drive account that suddenly I was getting hit
| with them
| gspr wrote:
| Ditto! I was sure I had accidentally changed some Google
| setting, and the Drive spam irritated me to no end. I'm so glad
| to be gradually downscaling my Google dependency. What a
| ridiculous company!
| hnburnsy wrote:
| What legitimate user shares GD files with emojis in the document
| name?
| bell-cot wrote:
| I'll guess that you have no daughters / granddaughters old
| enough to use social media much?
| hnburnsy wrote:
| Google Drive doesn't feel like frequently used social media
| tool. Maybe I am out of the loop.
| LightG wrote:
| Little things like this helped me give up on Google.
|
| Just ... rubbish.
|
| They're basically a showcase of technology.
|
| Impressive if they can keep the flywheel turning without giving a
| ... for the everyday people they once pretended to serve.
| dghughes wrote:
| Yeah there's been a noticeable uptick in Google Drive spam on
| Android. Sexy lady stuff, junk like work PowerPoint attachment,
| all kinds of spam.
| martin_a wrote:
| > Sexy lady stuff
|
| I have this all over YouTube, togeter with dubious "phone
| cleaners" and the whole range of probably malware and backdoor
| infested app garbage.
|
| Funny thing is: After reporting probably too much of those ads
| on YT, I can no longer report _any_ ad at all.
|
| Banned from the report function. wtf.
| someotherperson wrote:
| Instagram and similar can outright ban you for reporting
| spam. I guess spam reporting is also abused and brings you
| into a radar you weren't previously in.
|
| Nuts.
| slig wrote:
| Instagram has a serious "follow spam". Clearly fake
| accounts will follow people who follows some kind of niche
| account with hopes that people will follow back. It works,
| I can see that those spam-accounts have real followers.
|
| It tried to report those accounts to Instagram, and they
| don't care (the @spamaccount doesn't violate any ToS). So
| now I just block.
| bombcar wrote:
| There's no point in reporting spam, just setup an adblocker
| in general and move on.
| mysterydip wrote:
| "our metrics for how many bad ads we're serving goes down
| after we block users from reporting it."
|
| -machine learning algoritum somewhere
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| Ads on CNN AMP pages cover content, and there is no way to
| see the text underneath when using Chrome. So many reports,
| and nothing happens. Luckily Firefox lets me block the ads.
| wingmanjd wrote:
| I recall something similar occurring during my earlier CS:GO
| days. I was temp-banned for reporting/ attempting to vote out
| too many cheaters. -\\_(tsu)_/-
| csnover wrote:
| Not only is there no way to report spam on Google Drive, I
| noticed in the past few months that Google have also started
| refusing spam reports via SpamCop. Now those reports just go to
| google-abuse-bounces-reports@devnull[0].
|
| I suppose relative to their market size one could make an
| argument that they are doing a good job of "only" being the
| source of ~1.8% of all spam[1], and who knows what they did with
| these reports to begin with, but the intentional deterioration of
| reporting capability isn't a great look, and there's no effective
| recourse since they are too big to block outright.
|
| [0] https://www.spamcop.net/w3m?action=inprogress
|
| [1] https://www.spamcop.net/hoshame.shtml
| apatters wrote:
| It would be consistent with criminal monopoly behavior if
| Google's next step was to start charging us for submitting spam
| reports... watch this space
| dweekly wrote:
| I'm a Xoogler and one of the Twitter users included in this OP.
|
| A few interesting things here; reporting flow is _terrible_. You
| have to open the (porn /dangerous) on Google Drive in mobile,
| then on desktop open it in recent, then go to Help > Report
| Abuse/Copyright
|
| example link (NSFW!!)
| https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ftlYcB4sY7FLj_1WHkoS7Jd2... -
| links to rju2.all444link.com (many of these are using
| all444link.com) - last edit (shown on mobile only) was from
| ratchaneekorn_spk@spk.ac.th - abuse report link is at
| https://docs.google.com/u/0/abuse?id=1ftlYcB4sY7FLj_1WHkoS7J...
| with clear link structure
|
| Every single one of these spam pages was A) advertising porn, B)
| using all444link.com, and C) was from a user at a Thai
| educational domain name (different hosts, though).
| paulpauper wrote:
| It's not a high priory for Google stopping spam, same for all
| major tech companies. Their framing of this is that they are
| not the internet's babysitters. An assumption is users bear
| some responsibility for not being scammed or it's not
| profitable for them to invest lots of resources into stopping
| spam. ISPs are somewhat different in that customers are paying
| and ISPs bear a greater cost, so they tend to take spam more
| aggressively.
| blooalien wrote:
| They're maybe not the _internet 's_ "babysitters", but they
| _are_ the "babysitters" of their own network infrastructure
| and services, and these spammer scum _do_ abuse that
| infrastructure and waste /steal bandwidth and other resource
| that don't belong to them. You'd think Google would want to
| put a stop to that when it's gotten to a point where it's
| happening "at scale" and wasting large enough amounts of
| resource that it starts to equate to real-world dollars being
| lost/wasted. Sure, users bear some responsibility for not
| being scammed, but that doesn't mean that Google has to
| tolerate it happening through _their_ services and
| infrastructure, especially not when their own end user
| license agreements for those services _actively prohibit_
| such usage.
| paulpauper wrote:
| That is the problem. google does not deem this spam that is
| on their platform to be enough of a cost to justify trying
| doing more to stop it. It's a basic cost-benefit analysis.
| monkeybutton wrote:
| >They are not the internet's babysitters
|
| This kind of attitude is why we're all enduring nonstop spam
| calls.
| jlmorton wrote:
| Contra the point of this thread, Google actually prevents
| me from getting basically any spam calls.
|
| With the combination of Google Fi and Pixel, I receive very
| few spam calls. Almost all of them are automatically
| screened, the phone never rings, and I'm left with a "spam
| notification," with a transcript of the call asking me to
| extend my warranty.
|
| Similarly, essentially all spam text messages are
| identified as spam, and generate only a silent
| notification.
|
| For the few spam calls that slip through, it's one click to
| screen the call with Google Assistant.
| tedivm wrote:
| Are you confusing google drive spam with email spam? In this
| case Google is the ISP- as the article said, the Google Drive
| App is sending notifications to people for this spam.
| People's local ISPs have literally nothing to do with this at
| all.
| paulpauper wrote:
| Earthlink takes spam way more seriously than google because
| EarthLink has paying customers. Most people who use google
| products do not pay. Google is not going to invest millions
| of stopping spam if there is no financial reason to do so.
| That is the cold reality of cost-benefit analysis. There
| would have to be some legislation or legal precedent in
| which google is forced to do something.
| tedivm wrote:
| Google has paying customers for its office suite. They
| charge for individuals storage beyond the free tier, and
| their business users pay a per user fee.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Okay so bear with me. My local carwash has a legitimate crazy
| person there who tries to sell his flat-earth pamphlets. The
| carwash tries to chase him away, not because they're the
| street's "baby sitter", but because he's bad for business.
| People could go get a car wash elsewhere. People could store
| their files elsewhere.
| paulpauper wrote:
| Let's assume the carwash has thousands of very expensive
| customers who generate billions of dollars for it, and many
| more cheaper customers that generate much less or nothing.
| And the crazy person is hassling some of the non-paying
| customers, but it costs google $1000/day to stop him,
| because he's very persistent. Is it worth google paying
| $1000/day to protect those non-paying customers or help
| those expensive customers?
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Yeah that's my point, being the babysitter of your
| platform is sometimes cost-effective, and sometimes not.
| [deleted]
| Animats wrote:
| There's PhishTank.[1]
|
| [1] https://www.phishtank.com/phish_detail.php?phish_id=6178855
| jeffbee wrote:
| Would love to know why Google Public DNS is responding SERVFAIL
| on this domain. Everyone else can resolve it :-/
| tyingq wrote:
| It's working for me. $ host shkspr.mobi 8.8.8.8
| Using domain server: Name: 8.8.8.8 Address:
| 8.8.8.8#53 Aliases: shkspr.mobi has address
| 77.72.0.226
| jeffbee wrote:
| Weird because even Google's own DNS query UI says it is
| SERVFAIL:
|
| https://dns.google/query?name=shkspr.mobi
| "Status": 2 /* SERVFAIL */, "TC": false, "RD":
| true, "RA": true, "AD": false, "CD": false,
| "Question": [ { "name": "shkspr.mobi.",
| "type": 1 /* A */ } ], "Comment":
| "Resolution failure. Please check
| https://intodns.com/shkspr.mobi"
| tyingq wrote:
| Even weirder, works for me... -\\_(tsu)_/-
|
| https://dns.google/resolve?name=shkspr.mobi&type=A
|
| {"Status":0,"TC":false,"RD":true,"RA":true,"AD":false,"CD":
| false,"Question":[{"name":"shkspr.mobi.","type":1}],"Answer
| ":[{"name":"shkspr.mobi.","type":1,"TTL":14400,"data":"77.7
| 2.0.226"}],"Comment":"Response from 139.162.230.184."}
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(page generated 2022-04-04 23:00 UTC)