I’m looking for an easy way to share a PDF file for an unknown amount of people to download, some of whom might sadly be nefarious and/or jerks. I know I can get a shareable link to my google drive, but is this a good idea? Will giving people a hook into my drive compromise the rest of it? Or should I just bite the bullet and use a free file sharing site and go through the whole rigamarole of user name /password to yet another site I may never use again?
To be clear, I’m not expecting people to be jerks, but y’know.
And if so, if you have free file sharing site opinions…
From what I understand, copyable links to individual files in services like Drive and Dropbox do not grant further access, unless those services possess a massive exploit that would probably wreck the companies behind them.
Which is said not to be a smarmy dick, but to note that, hey, companies fuck that stuff up all the time. But to my knowledge, these specific companies haven’t fucked that specific stuff up yet.
I’ve received Google drive links from clients and vendors, and I’ve only been able to access/download from the specific folder I was invited to.
In one case, I was invited to a Google doc, but the person invited my work email and my personal Gmail (which is what I’m logged into on Chrome) and I couldn’t access it. I had the contact add my personal email, and I could only access the specific document.
I use Google Drive all the time for material and work under strict NDAs and that are propietary. I’m actually paying for it too (Gsuite) so they have a responsibility to me to keep their security working.
If there is an exploit, it would destroy Google or Dropbox or whomever, as Armando says. The alternative is to set up and run a server yourself and maintain all the tools, security, username/pw database, etc.
I don’t think it would “destroy” Google or Dropbox. Most people value convenience over security a lot of the time, and would continue using it after receiving some empty assurances that a breach would “never happen again”.
