Lots of publically accessible Google Drive links are going to be broken and inaccessible in the near future, read why here.
A lot of publicly accessible Google Drive links will no longer be accessible later this year unless their owners opt out of new security enhancements. These enhancements are being brought to Google Drive on September 23rd, 2021, the company announced in a blog post today.
Once this change goes live, Google says that users will need a “resource key” to access a publicly shared link. However, users won’t need an updated link with said resource key appended if they’ve already accessed that file before in the past. As a result of this change, we can imagine that lots of Google Drive links shared online on forums and other sites will no longer work as their owners neglect to update them, leaving them only accessible to the people that have already clicked the links before. This comes after Google also announced similar changes to YouTube’s unlisted videos earlier today.
According to the post made on the Google Workspace blog, this won’t affect all files. Users who have shared a file that is affected by this change will get an email from Google informing them of this change and how to opt out of needing those files from being updated. These emails will be sent out to users starting on July 26th. Google shared a copy of a sample email to show end-users what the message they’ll get will look like. The company doesn’t recommend opting out all files and says that only the files that you want publicly accessible should be opted out. Users have until September 13th to decide if they want the update applied, so if you have no files that are publicly accessible, then you won’t need to do anything.
Please signal boost this. I have seen so many posts in just the last year with links to google drives filled with info on BLM, community resources, anti-bigotry education, Anarchism, activism, community organization, all KINDS of things - potentially losing access to those resources is IMPORTANT
