Google doesn't embed a decryption key in their URL. AFAIK, they are just long lookup keys that are unguessable. The difference between that and local encryptio

Google doesn't embed a decryption key in their URL. AFAIK, they are just long lookup keys that are unguessable. The difference between that and local encryption is if you trust the storage provider. If you were a journalist in China, you wouldn't want your documents accessible by your hosting provider. In the above scenario, you obviously wouldn't want to submit a decryption key to the server as part of a URL/POST. Look at how services like mega.nz are designed. They popularized an approach where the decryption key is in the URL's label, which is not submitted to the server. The files are decrypted with javascript locally.