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by bellyfullofbac 1775 days ago
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.

2 comments

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."

Perhaps URLs should have an escape character which says that sensitive information starts/ends, so browsers can take appropriate action.
Dear god, no. No more messing with URLs.