[br2]

Are Skydrive documents somewhat public or are people just sharing them by mistake? I don't use it nor am I that familiar with it.

[bellyfullofbac]

You can create a long complicated link to share with other people, even people without Skydrive/OneDrive/Dropbox/Google Drive accounts. But sometimes people publish these links somewhere where a search engine's crawler sees it and follow it.

I remember spotting someone's URL to a Google Doc on their screen which their camera caught in their YouTube video. I manually typed it into my browser's URL bar and voila, I could read that document. Nothing juicy though.

[ethbr0]

I've got a great story about this, ad absurd, from a HIPAA-covered entity.

IT turned on One Drive backups for their desktop image, without communicating to users.

A week later, there's a flurry of a few tens of thousand angrygrams about users storing sensitive documents in the cloud.

... by which they meant (in user terms) "having files on your Desktop."

[amelius]

Perhaps URLs should have an escape character which says that sensitive information starts/ends, so browsers can take appropriate action.

[jaywalk]

Dear god, no. No more messing with URLs.

[eganist]

> Are Skydrive documents somewhat public or are people just sharing them by mistake? I don't use it nor am I that familiar with it.

Almost all of this would be by mistake, no different than misconfiguring an S3 bucket.