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I understand people may want to upload documents for sharing by link for example, but its obviously not clear enough to users that their documents can be search
by alphabettsy 10y ago
I understand people may want to upload documents for sharing by link for example, but its obviously not clear enough to users that their documents can be searched by anyone and MS is even providing a document search with OCR it seems.
I doubt these people intended to share, in a publicly searchable form, copies of their tax forms, passports, medical records, client lists, etc.
It's easy to call the users careless or stupid, but that expectation should've been baked into the product. For a document to be indexed and publicly searchable should be an explicit setting, not a default.
- dhimes 10y agoAgree. For a product that you pay for whose very DNA has evolved around businesses and organizations, this is unfathomable.
- johansch 10y agoThe messed up thing here, if I understand the article correctly, is that documents shared via a private URL containing a private key were all searchable via the search box on docs.com. That's beyond being a UX issue, it's just.. wrong. So wrong that I could see lawsuits from this issue. It's also a class of bug that I really couldn't imagine happening outside of Microsoft in terms of consumer software services from large-scale companies. Here's a free idea for Google: Create a safety index service for saas stuff and then apply it to Chrome. I'd use it.
- nebabyte 10y agoI guess technically it could be an API or a permissions issue. But yeah, not UX
- alphabettsy 10y agoMaybe a UX issue because it allows people to, easily without proper warning, create a link for sharing like Dropbox, but unlike Dropbox it not only makes everything indexable, they even do it themselves and provide a search engine for the docs.
- contextfree 10y agoNot sure where you see anything about private URLs in the article?
- treve 10y agoWhy use OCR when you have access to the actual text?
- alphabettsy 10y agoI was referring to the images and PDFs that would normally not be searchable.