A bunch of Google Drive links are about to be broken

A lot of publicly accessible Google Drive links will no longer be accessible later this year unless their owners opt out of new security enhancements. These enhancements are being brought to Google Drive on September 23rd, 2021, the company announced in a blog post today.

Once this change goes live, Google says that users will need a “resource key” to access a publicly shared link. However, users won’t need an updated link with said resource key appended if they’ve already accessed that file before in the past. As a result of this change, we can imagine that lots of Google Drive links shared online on forums and other sites will no longer work as their owners neglect to update them, leaving them only accessible to the people that have already clicked the links before. This comes after Google also announced similar changes to YouTube’s unlisted videos earlier today.

According to the post made on the Google Workspace blog, this won’t affect all files. Users who have shared a file that is affected by this change will get an email from Google informing them of this change and how to opt out of needing those files from being updated. These emails will be sent out to users starting on July 26th.

:story: XDA