Google drive privacy issues? Everything You Need to Know

If you use Google Drive frequently, you made and shared a lot of files with various people. While at first, you might not think too much about eventual privacy issues when using this service, there are still present. You probably encountered some already but wasn’t aware of them.

Anyway, the good news is that there are some things you can do to secure your privacy. There aren’t that many options you can change since most of the potential privacy issues only happen when you share files. Still, it’s important to know what exactly can you do when you share files, so, without further ado, here are Google Drive’s privacy issues and what you can do about them.

■ Open your favorite browser and in the address bar, type www.google.com and press Enter.

■ Click on the Sign In and provide your credentials, if you’re not already signed in.





■ Click on the grid icon (the nine small squares).





■ Now click on the Google Drive.





■ In here right click on the file of your choice and click on Share (if you don’t have any, you can just create one by right-clicking or clicking on My Drive and then choosing the type of a file).





■ In the small box you can type in the people you want to share your file with. To the right, you can click on the pencil icon, and it will show you the options on what they can do with that file. The important thing is in the Advanced section, so click on it.





■ Just right above the done button, you can restrict people from changing access or adding new people, as well as restricting them from downloading or copying your file by clicking on the check-boxes. As you can see these options are turned off by default, so you’ll have to do this for every file if you want these options turned on.





■ You can also share your file by a shareable link. Click on Change.





■ In here, you can click on Anyone with the link to allow people access to your file if they have a link (and you can also allow them to view, edit, etc.). If by any chance the option Public on the web is checked, anyone on the web can access your file.





■ Well, there you go. As mentioned there aren’t that many options and the ones in the Advanced section are the most important ones. Also, the option to publicly share your file is turned off by default, so just make sure that you don’t activate it by accident.