Aprile, 2022

Engineer Darren Smith remembers the day that Google Drive launched in 2012. “We were all in a conference room, sort of like a war room,” he says. “We all cheered when the first user was live with Drive!” And just like that, Drive was…well, alive. (Fun fact: The team who launched it actually had “It exists” shirts made.)

1. Drive was originally available via invite only when it was first rolling out. “We were all given tokens — sort of like digital passes — that we could share with family and friends,” says Darren. “It was really fun to see people finally using this thing we’d been working on for so long.”
2. It’s hard to remember a time before you could save files from Gmail directly to Drive, but it was only a short while ago: Attachments in Gmail were introduced in 2013, saving us all from that agonizing experience of downloading file after file after file.
3. You can store a lot in Google Drive — but maybe you don’t know how much. Ahem, a few numbers that may surprise you! You can store up to:
   • 1.02 million characters in a Google Doc
   • 10 million cells or 18,278 columns in a Google Sheet
   • 100 MB of data in a Google Slide presentation

Check out this Help Center article for more impressive storage stats.

4. The icon for Google Drive went through many, many iterations. Eventually, the team settled on the one we know and love — except it used to be rotated slightly differently so that it looked a little like a “D.” Eventually the team realized it looked too similar to the Google Play icon, so they rotated it . “Now it points up, sort of suggesting you’re uploading something to the cloud,” Drive Product Manager Scott Limbird says.

5. Accessibility is a major priority for Drive and all Google products — everyone should be able to use Drive, and get the most out of it. A huge step toward making this happen was the launch of screen reader compatibility in 2014, an update specifically designed for blind and low-vision users.

6. Google’s productivity expert Laura Mae Martin regularly shares her Drive tips with other Googlers — here’s a handy one for handling advanced images in Drive: In Drive, select New + and then Google Drawings (or type drawing.new into your browser!). From there, copy/paste, drag, upload or import your image file; then you can edit it, download it in any format and share the image like you would any other Drive file. Of course you can also use Google Drawings to make your own image entirely and import it into a Doc or Slide, or save it in various file formats.

7. If you’re one of the many people with way too many things in your Drive, then search chips are your friend. We introduced this feature in February of this year, and it helps you find what you’re looking for based on what kind of file it is, who else is working on it with you…the list goes on and on.

8. Keeping users and their Drive content safe is important, which is why we’ve introduced features like suspicious file warnings, labels for sensitive files and more secure ways to share to broad audiences.

9. In 2017, we introduced Backup and Sync to make it easy for folks to control how their photos and files were backed up to Google services — and then in 2021, Drive for desktop replaced Backup and Sync, which made it even easier to access files from any device, anywhere. (Not to mention it made file and photo management simpler and faster!)

10. Darren says one of his favorite Drive memories actually happened outside the office. “When my daughter was getting married, her wedding planner was sharing all these files and folders with us,” he says. “And of course, she did that with Drive!”

Happy 10 years, Google Drive! You’re an excellent home for our Docs, Sheets, Slides…and everything else.

Editor’s Note from Ludovic Blecher, Head of Google News Initiative Innovation: The GNI Innovation Challengeprogram is designed to stimulate forward-thinking ideas for the news industry. The story below by Gabriel Kahn, professor at USC Annenberg School of Journalism, is part of an innovator seriessharing inspiring stories and lessons from funded projects.

One year ago, our team at the University of Southern California started the Crosstown Neighborhood Data Project. Rapidly expanding news deserts – areas that receive no regular news coverage – can be seen across the US. Small town newspapers are drying up, and toxic “pink-slime” pseudo journalism is seeping in. These news deserts are growing even in big cities. Los Angeles has lost four local papers recently, and so many neighborhoods are overlooked by the news outlets that remain. That is why we started covering every corner of Los Angeles with a four-person editorial team.

It sounds impossible, but it’s not. Here’s how we did it, and what we learned. 

Each week, Crosstown sends out 110 unique email newsletters, one for each neighborhood in this city of four million. The newsletter features brief news stories that hit people where they live: charts and graphics on the number of new COVID infections and vaccination rates, plus pieces about housing, crime and traffic in each neighborhood. 

How do we do this? Through data. We’ve been collecting a trove of information on how Los Angeles lives, works and gets around. All this data is free, but much of it is hard to read and is stored on clunky local government websites. We scrape the data and organize it by neighborhood. That way we can quickly tell how many homes were burglarized in Hollywood last month, or figure out the neighborhood where the most new buildings are going up.

We then write one template for our newsletter, and our custom-built software creates 110 different versions, each with the proper data, visualizations and context for that neighborhood. This wasn’t easy. Our software engineering team spent a year building it, funded by the Google News Initiative Innovation Challenge. We’ve now sent out more than 60 sets of weekly newsletters and learned a great deal. 

Increased engagement

Our biggest takeaway is that people truly engage with news when it’s about their neighborhood. The open rates on our newsletter are over 70%. Most weeks they exceed 80%. The lowest we ever recorded was 55%. This compares to the industry standard for news-related newsletter opening rates (22% according to MailChimp or just under 24% according to CampaignMonitor).

Why? People can’t get this news anywhere else. No other news organizations deliver this level of hyper-localized data. Second, it’s news people want. Currently, there is a widespread impression that Los Angeles is in the midst of a crime wave. Giving people verified stats about their neighborhood and explaining the broader context, such as whether a particular type of crime is rising or falling and how their area compares to others in the city, is a vital public service. 

One example of this is that in one of our newsletters we included the number of building demolitions that had taken place in each neighborhood. A reader then had hard data for her Hollywood neighborhood, which she took to city planners and made a public testimony to convey endangered and historic sites.

Our newsletter also hits the inbox with an appealing subject line, such as “Omicron’s impact on Koreatown,” or, “How much illegal dumping is happening in Venice?” When you live in a big city, it can be difficult to get a read on your own neighborhood. A weekly email with some basic information can be invaluable. 

We’ve found it’s also a great way to engage the audience. Some neighborhoods are battling pressing issues such as traffic congestion or rapidly rising rents. When we cover that in a story, they write back wanting to know more. This allows us to figure out who cares about what across an entire city. In the year since we launched, traffic to the website has increased by 30%.

More importantly, we have a tenfold increase in our audience reaching back out to us. We now know what neighborhoods these audience members live in, because they respond to us directly from their neighborhood email account. This helps us understand which issues are most important to people in different parts of the city.

We’re only at the beginning of understanding what kind of hyperlocal stories we can tell. But our goals for this year lie beyond Los Angeles. We’re now piloting our project with three other newsrooms and we’re hoping to find even more that want to try this technology and approach. We believe using data in this way can be a powerful tool to help newsrooms reach and engage new audiences without raising costs.

We work hard to keep Google Play a safe, trusted space for people to enjoy the latest Android apps. Today, we’re launching a new feature, the Data safety section, where developers will be required to give people more information about how apps collect, share and secure users’ data. Users will start seeing the Data safety section in Google Play today, and developers are required to complete this section for their apps by July 20th. As app developers update their functionality or change their data handling practices, they will show the latest in the apps’ Data safety section.

A unified view of app safety in Google Play

We heard from users and app developers that displaying the data an app collects, without additional context, is not enough. Users want to know for what purpose their data is being collected and whether the developer is sharing user data with third parties. In addition, users want to understand how app developers are securing user data after an app is downloaded. That’s why we designed the Data safety section to allow developers to clearly mark what data is being collected and for what purpose it’s being used. Users can also see whether the app needs this data to function or if this data collection is optional.

Here are the information developers can show in the Data safety section:

• Whether the developer is collecting data and for what purpose.
• Whether the developer is sharing data with third parties.
• The app’s security practices, like encryption of data in transit and whether users can ask for data to be deleted.
• Whether a qualifying app has committed to following Google Play’s Families Policy to better protect children in the Play store.
• Whether the developer has validated their security practices against a global security standard (more specifically, the MASVS).

Putting users in control, before and after you download

Giving users more visibility into how apps collect, share and secure their data through the Data safety section is just one way we’re keeping the Android users and ecosystem safe.

We’ve also worked hard to give users control of installed apps through simple permissions features. For example, when an app asks to access “your location”, users can quickly and easily decide whether they want to grant that permission – for one time use, only while using the app, or all the time. For sensitive permissions like camera, microphone, or location data, people can go to the Android Privacy dashboard to review data access by apps.

Apps should help users explore the world, connect with loved ones, do work, learn something new, and more without compromising user safety. The new Data safety section, in addition to Google Play’s existing safety features, gives people the visibility and control they need to enjoy their apps.

To learn more about Google Play’s Data safety section, check out this guide.