I sometimes get linked google docs links and would like to view them without visiting a google site directly.
You must log in or register to comment.
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn’t great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don’t promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
- 0 users online
- 57 users / day
- 383 users / week
- 1.5K users / month
- 5.7K users / 6 months
- 1 subscriber
- 3.13K Posts
- 78.3K Comments
- Modlog
What are you trying to achieve that wouldn’t be achieved with a VPN and a private browser session?
Not a proxy, but cryptpad is a fairly good alternative.
Even when using open source alternatives the server know your IP and you don’t know what they are going to do.
They were asking about a proxy, not a frontend. Like, invidious and piped are YouTube frontends, but both of them has a proxy feature, always-on with piped, which makes the frontend proxy all requests (even video segments) through the server of your choice.
So with a proxy service, google will not see your IP, unless the proxy you use is a mole.
I’m not familiar with such solutions, but I wouldn’t get your hopes high, as Google Docs is not a collection of publicly available files (like YouTube), rather files closed behind different accesses.
Based on this, depending on how a file is shared with you, you could be asked to authenticate yourself somehow. Without the deeper understanding of your situation, I can only think of one solution: downloading these files with manipulating the links, like this for example (if they are public): https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9045392/getting-the-download-link-for-a-public-google-docs-file?rq=1
If they are not public, I think you still have the chance to do this, but I can’t see any steps around authenticating with Google in their own site. And then download the file.
I’m not aware of any Google Docs frontends. But maybe a dummy Google account using a private window with ad-blocking and tracker-blocking enabled would work?
This is not really a useful answer, but its an option —
make a scary looking autoreply; “the link you have sent is has been detected as mailware and has been blocked”. Just play dumb and ask for a PDF/some other means of file transfer.
That’s a very useful workaround
Yeah you’re right that’s not a useful answer. This question in particular was also prompted by being linked a public resource, so even if I got someone else to download it for me and send it to me as a .ods file (it was a Google Sheets link specifically), that would just be offloading who visits the google site to someone else. Ie using your friend as a proxy. Which may be fine if you just don’t want to visit the site yourself and that’s your only objection, but I am pretty easily traceable to the type of friend who would send me a google docs link, and it definitely doesn’t offer the same anonymity as a proxy like Piped which is used by a lot of people (as opposed to a proxy like my friend, a proxy which is only used by one person…)
Afaik, no