Google does a pretty decent job of randomizing the URLs it generates for its documents, which means there’s a very slim chance of someone brute-force guessing the URL to a document. Another was the draft of an unpublished whitepaper about artificial intelligence by a group of academics. One Google Doc laid out the internal discussions of a PR company about their plans to discuss their service and offerings with me. And in the past few months, I’ve seen quite a few documents with information not meant to be viewed by the public, and certainly not by me. But this wasn’t the first time that someone browsed to my blog through a Google Doc URL. Everything the spreadsheet contained was already available online. To be fair, in this specific case, I didn’t stumble on any private and sensitive information. This is a stark example of “security by obscurity,” where people leave their assets unprotected on the internet, thinking that no one will find them. A few uneventful minutes later, when a letter popped in my inbox through my contact page, I already knew who had sent it and what it would contain without even opening it. (She couldn’t see my identity, courtesy of anonymous sharing, which displays the names of users without explicit permissions as anonymous animals.)Ī quick Google search later, I found out that she worked for a sponsorship and deal-sharing company. I was quickly able to see the name of one other user who else was using the document at that moment, probably the same user who had just clicked on the link to TechTalks. The spreadsheet contained the contact information and website URLs of hundreds of bloggers, including myself. What was surprising however, was the fact that the document was open to edits, which meant I could make any changes I wanted. As with all referrers, there was a link to the source file.Ĭurious, I clicked on the link, and I was transferred to a spreadsheet that was unsurprisingly shared anonymously, accessible to anyone with the link. How anonymous sharing on Google Docs gives away your secretsĪs the editor of a fast-growing tech blog, I regularly monitor the analytics page to see the “referrers.” This is where I can see the sources from which users come to my site, and it helps me track sites that link back to or republish TechTalks’ content.Ī while ago, while going through the referrers, I noticed that someone had reached TechTalks through Google Sheets. Their line of reasoning is that as long as you don’t give away the document’s URL to anyone, no one will find it. And they often use this setting to collaborate on documents with sensitive content. This anonymous sharing is problematic because many organizations use it when they want to share a document with a large number of people but don’t want to explicitly add their emails to sharing settings. The middle option, “Anyone with link,” won’t make the document indexable by search engines but people who have the link will be able to access it. If an uninvited party discovers the document’s URL, they won’t be able to access it.
On the other hand, the “Specific people” setting will make the document available only to the people with whom you decide to share it. The “Public on the web” setting makes the document completely public and available for indexing, which means it’ll appear in Google search and anyone with the document’s URL can access it. On both ends of the privacy spectrum are the “Public on the web” and the “Specific people” settings. Google offers three modes of document sharing, each with different privacy and access settings: Here’s what you need to know about preserving the privacy of your data when sharing Google Docs with colleagues and friends. Users and organizations often choose convenience over the protection of their information and use anonymous sharing, which makes their sensitive business information accessible to unintended parties. However, one problem I’ve observed is how easily people ignore the privacy concerns surrounding Google Docs when sharing and collaborating on documents. And with good reason: It’s free, it’s easy to use, and it’s already available to every user who has a Google account (which includes more than one billion active Gmail users). Google’s productivity suite has become the defacto work platform for millions of people and organizations across the world. Out of the numerous companies I’ve worked with in the past years, most use Google Docs to submit and collaborate on draft articles and documents.
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