It's not just MS. I think they might have fixed it now, but my personal favorite was when Google photos would send me a notification with a preview of an AI generated album of my photos they made for me even though the app did not now, nor ever have permissions (on Android) to look at said photos. And it too would then "catch up" and ask permission to see my files and I'd say "no" and then the preview would go away.
Similar with google docs, if you share a link to a doc, even if the doc is restricted access, anyone can see the thumbnail icon with the contents of page 1.
In this particular issue, MS has an opposite problem: you grab a document link, grant a permission to someone, and they still can't access the document through the original link (you need to fetch a new link just for them).
Kind of. The default behavior is to create a new link. So when you grant someone access you are actually creating a new link. However, you can find the buried manage access settings and change the permissions on the original link. If you do that then they can use the original link.
(Teams makes this Byzantine in the extreme to accomplish as you have to go find the folder it drops all shared files in to gain access to manage access settings. But it does allow you to retro change access even for things shared in Teams)
Yeah, many things are definitely possible but to me it seems like the user experience is driven by the technical implementation and architecture, instead of vice versa.
From the outside looking in, it's the age old organizational problem when there are no good synergies between customer experience and development teams.
Product managers will decide to show the thumbnail in situations because it results in more click throughs. In many cases they'll have done their research to know that many customers take steps to restrict what they share (think profitable but conservative companies) but will choose to show the thumbnails anyway.
Some customers will push back and have enough leverage to get an exception, but the default answer will be that this can't be disabled. You'll have some sales engineer challenged about the product behavior as part of an RFP and they'll try to convince you that nothing is leaked while knowing the financial opportunity would be much larger with these customers, if there was more concern for the customer.
Possibly they refer to this: https://hackernews.hn/item?id=39172527“I received a link to a Google doc on slack recently, but the owner had forgotten to share permissions with me. Though I couldn't view the doc when I clicked it, I did notice that I could view the first page of the doc in the link preview. It was very high res and I could view the text clearly.”.
If so, pasting that link into Slack may reveal its first page.
It could even be a Google docs Slack app that has the bug of generating a preview if the sharer has permissions on the doc (and they usually do) and the preview generation enabled.
(Not the same guy but) I've definitely heard about this bug in the past, but I assume it is fixed now. I can't actually find a reference for it. If I find one within the hackernews comment edit window I'll add it here.
However when you're inside a note (which BTW, can also be converted into checkboxes, aka very simple TODOs), Google Keep, the note taking app from search giant Google, doesn't have search functionality for that specific note.
Besides the many small bugs, sometimes the missing functionality in Google apps is mind boggling.
On a asimialr vein, Microsoft's OneNote, which is of course part of the famed and expensive Office suite, still doesn't support Find and Replace. But, they do have a meticulously written official support article that suggests you can copy the text you want to replace with, and then do Find, double click the text it finds, ctrl+V, and repeat...
Wow that is ridiculous. But really, OneNote is the most crusty part of the whole office suite. It's completely unfit for purpose. They don't even bother to make a web version that properly works (you get signed out every day and you can only search in one folder, not even a whole notebook)
I moved to obsidian with self hosted livesync and it's such a breath of fresh air. It actually does what it says. There's tons of plugins. The sync never drops a beat.
It's a typical example of Microsoft's solutions to be B-quality at best. An AAA level solution is always better.. Microsoft's goal is only to be not bad enough for people to drop the "included with your subscription" product and go for something actually fit for purpose.
Unfortunately I'm stuck with OneNote at work. I guess they want me to be ineffective and inefficient.
It's just annoying because I don't have any use for "office" applications but a personal knowledgebase is something that's super important to me.
I really want a simple and easy to use shopping/TODO/checklist app that I can use with my family, from a vendor that has been around for a long time. Ideally free, but I'm fine with paying a small price for it. It should be available on Windows/Android/iOS.
The problem is, I don't really trust most small vendors...
That's odd, were you synchronizing your photos to Google Photos[1] in any way, from any device? Presumably they would've had to be synchronized to Google at some point for them to generate an album of said photos.
The team that wrote the preview portion of the app is a different team to the one that wrote the permission requesting part. They communicate asynchronously (as a team/org, but this probably is reflected in the app's architecture!), which means the outcome is eventually consistent! But you managed to observe one of those inconsistent cases!
“Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure.” —Melvin Conway
I've heard this was the secret to AWS's taking off twenty years ago: Bezos told the various teams they can only interact with each other as if they were vendors and customers to each other.
It was formulated a little different. But this was the 2002 mandate:
1. All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.
2. Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces.
3. There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team’s data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network.
4. It doesn’t matter what technology they use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols — doesn’t matter.
5. All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions.
Source: Steve Yegge’s “Amazon understand platforms and Google doesn’t” rant - copy found at https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 among others, since it was originally posted on Google+ and link-rotted.
Then maybe the default value for "permission to access photos" should be no, so they can only start accessing them after you give them permission. But yeah, with stuff like this it's always "opt-out", never "opt-in", unless someone forces them to...
The team that wrote the preview portion just accessed the photos with elevated permissions if permission wasn’t granted yet? That doesn’t make any sense
Google Photos is not a mobile app. Google Photos is a SaaS webapp that happens to have a companion app for Android. Whatever OS-level settings affect the Android app itself, they have no bearing on what Google Photos the SaaS can or cannot do.
it's very easy to imagine the scenario where this happens.
Those photos may have already been uploaded to google's web servers (from my understanding, this happens with google photos by default?), from which a preview has been generated. The permission is at the android app level, and is requested at some point to ensure that the permission model is respected from the POV of the user. I can imagine the permission request being out of sync!
