Google Drive ‘Security Update’ Bringing Changes in Link Share Settings

Believe it or not, Google is changing the way of generating Drive links for sharing purposes. With this, the technological giant Google claims that most of the Google Drive links may not be accessible by mid-September this year.

Google announced an update that claims to tighten the security of drive files. According to some news reports, the update is all set to go live on September 13. Once the update is applicable on Google Drive, all the generated links will be safeguarded with a resource key for more secured sharing purposes.

So, what about the previously created and shared links?

That’s a common question in everyone’s mind who has plenty of crucial links lying in their Google Drive. Well, people will be able to view those links even after the new updates. But when talking about creating new ones after September 13, you will need a resource key to share files.

In this context, the workspace admins will have enough time till July 23 to decide how they are going to apply the security update in an organization that creates and exchanges a good number of links regularly. Meanwhile, the individual users will receive a notification about the changes. This process will begin from July 26 until September 13. These notifications will give Google account users ample time to decide if they wish to continue with the same settings or want to upgrade it.

Many people are getting concerned about the duplicate files stored in their Google Drive for years now. Google users need to learn the process of evaluating the duplicate files in the Drive. You can check the process here and give it a try for real. As of now, the giant suggests not to apply the updates only to the files posted with a ‘publicly’ permission tag.

Furthermore, the changes are likely to bring some differences in the YouTube video links as well. After the update, the videos uploaded before January 1, 2017, will be marked as ‘unlisted’ on the platform. For those who don’t know, unlisted is a video setting that permits the users to upload a video. These videos can be shared and played by anyone in the world using a link. The significant difference is that people won’t be able to view those videos using the search option.

All in all, this security measure will make it harder for people to access old YouTube videos with the ‘search’ option. Here, the video creators can have a sigh of relief as Google will give them the chance to opt-out to keep their videos in the current state forever. This means the new security measures will not change the outlook or status of the old videos even after the upcoming update.

Quick overview

Google has announced some revolutionary changes to be done in Google Drive soon. These amendments will change accessing files on the Drive while strengthening the security measures for all Google Drive users. The initiative is innovative and good but only when people will get used to the same.