Slack’s Google Drive App can share your personal Docs and Drive recordsdata
In 2017, Slack launched a well-liked Google Drive integration that makes it straightforward to embed, share, and get notified about new objects added to Google Drive, together with recordsdata, photos, docs, and extra. We use it every day right here at Kapwing, a web-based video editing startup, since we run internally on prime of Google Docs and Google Drive. Lately, nonetheless, I found that utilizing file previews with the Google Drive Slack App will enable it to share fully personal, unshared paperwork and recordsdata inside your workspace.
The Slack Google Drive integration has a characteristic referred to as File Previews that’s enabled by default. That is often fairly useful, as a result of once you share a hyperlink to a Google Doc, or any file in Google Drive, the bot will routinely present a preview of the doc.
Nonetheless, just lately I observed that it was doing this for paperwork that I had not but shared. I additionally observed that when sure hyperlinks had been despatched to me, I might see a preview of the doc though I did not have entry to it but.
If I open up the URL of the file preview, the preview is a full decision 800 × 1035 picture that exhibits the whole first web page of the doc.
The app does this for personal photos uploaded to Google Drive as effectively:
It looks as if what’s occurring right here is that once I share a doc or file through a hyperlink, the Google Drive Slack app will routinely create a preview picture of that file, utilizing my very own Google permissions. The issue is, that preview picture will get re-uploaded to Slack’s CDN, and is in excessive decision and is now accessible to everybody in my Slack workspace.
You possibly can check this your self by creating a non-public Google doc, or importing a picture accessible solely to you to your Google Drive, after which sending the hyperlink to a colleague in Slack. Should you use the online Slack consumer, you can examine the total hyperlink to the picture preview as effectively:
It may not be the most important deal to some folks, however I feel it might probably undoubtedly be an issue in case you are not being cautious with sharing personal Google paperwork in a public slack channel or workspace, particularly since File Previews are enabled by default. Going ahead, I feel it might be higher for the app to make this clear, since it might probably undoubtedly be utilized by of us in Slack to see one thing they weren’t allowed to.
I hope this helps others on the market utilizing the Google Drive Slack app!