One benefit of having your documents in the cloud is it makes it easy to share them. If you need to send someone a file, instead of sending it as an e-mail attachment (not a great idea) you can generate a link and send that.
When you send a file via a shared link, you have the ability to disable it once received. In practice, many of us share the file, send the link, and forget all about it.
This leaves unnecessarily open links out there, and there have been some scary vulnerabilities lately.
What I do is have a recurring task in my task management application to review my shared links every month and disable the ones that I don’t need anymore. Here is how to do that for Dropbox, Evernote, and Box.com.
Disable Shared Links In Dropbox
Dropbox makes it easy to see what links you have out there. Log in to the web interface at http://www.dropbox.com and click on Links on the left.
For each link you want to disable, click the X on the right.
At the time of writing this, there is no way to disable all shared links at once, but according to a Dropbox blog post they’ll be adding that soon.
Disable Shared Links In Evernote
To find all your notes that have individual shared links, click in the search box and type the following:
sharedate:*
For each note, go through and unshare if desired.
Evernote Mac
In the Mac client, click on the right-arrow icon and choose Stop Sharing.
Evernote Windows
In the Windows client, click on the note’s Share icon and choose Stop Sharing.
Evernote Web
In the Web client, click on the note’s Share icon and then click Link.
When the Shared Note Attributes window pops up, hit Stop Sharing.
Disable Shared Links In Box
Unfortunately, I couldn’t figure out a way to pull a list of all the shared links in Box. If you know how to do that, please leave a comment.
Visually, you can tell that a file is shared because the little link icon is enabled. To disable sharing, click on the triangle icon beside the file, choose Share, and choose Disable Link.
Make It A Routine
Ideally, you will remember to disable your shared links once you don’t need them anymore. If you’re forgetful like me, put it in your to-do list to check your links every month or so.
(Photo by Carlos Maya)
