Google Drive spam in 2025

2025-09-21

In the past few days I've received four notifications on my phone for files being shared with me by people whom I do not know – it's not a big number, but it's four notifications too many in my opinion.

As someone who understands computers, I know better than to open these files as they likely contain something malicious, but not everyone understands computers so well and could be easily fooled by such tricks.

Naturally my first reaction was to investigate how I could disable files from being shared with me by people who are not on my contact list, but to my surprise, no such feature exists.

Google Drive was released to the world in 2012, and it took 9 years before we got a feature to block senders from sharing files - but this completely misses the mark, because I've already been exposed to a potential threat. It surprises me that one of the richest organisations on the planet took 9 years to release such a mediocre fix to this problem, which by the way doesn't really work, because we all know that the people who are trying to scam us out of our life savings use ephemeral throwaway email addresses, so what's the point?

As time goes by I get the ever-increasing feeling that I need to decouple from Google, but that's easier said than done, because I kinda like Google – it provides convenience and removes the frictions from managing my digital life – however – Google Drive is an extension to my filesystem and I should be able to choose to keep my filesystem locked away from the horrors that we are exposed to on the Internet, and if Google is unable to offer those protections, then it may be time to pack up my things and find an alternative solution.