Why am I getting 400 error "You cannot share this item because it has been flagged as inappropriate." using Google Drive api for file sharing

Question

I have an app (Angular, Firebase, gCloud) that lets users manage their clients. The Google Drive integration allows the user to create and share Google Drive items with their clients. It has been working for years and then last week started throwing this 400 error upon 'share':

"error": {
    "code": 400,
    "message": "Bad Request. User message: \"You cannot share this item because it has been flagged as inappropriate.\"",...

This is the use case- User authenticates against Google within my app and selects a folder on their GDrive where our app will create new student folders. User creates a new student which auto generates a new student folder on the Cs GDrive in the specified location. User adds an email to the student account (gmail or non-gmail). User clicks 'share' btn to share the folder with the student. The user receives a 400 error that the folder can't be shared due to inappropriate content.

This week users have found their accounts flagged and all of their Google Drive shares revoked, even share privileges established months ago. The must write into the Workspace team to have the flag removed.

Google cloud support says there's nothing they can do and have passed 2 separate cases to the Workspace team who, each time, reach out once and then go silent.

The code is simple enough Create :

this.gapi.client.drive.files.create(...)

Share :

this.gapi.client.drive.permissions.create(...)

Any insight or advice is greatly appreciated!

We've attempted to share with the 'notify' flag off but this doesn't change anything.

Again, this has been working for a long time and no code changes have been made to this area of the code recently.

Answer 1

This has finally been resolved by Google Workspace Support though it was not straight forward in the least.

1 of 5 tickets got a result. All the other tickets I filed received responss like these; 'This is not an issue on our side. Good luck.' 'This is a problem with your 3rd party app. Contact the developer.' 'This is not an issue from Google Services.'

Finally, a rep replied with 'Clearly, there is an issue here. From my previous experience, this issue can be due to the service account, which can be flagged. Can you please send me the service account so I can send it to our engineers and ask them to check?'

They were able to un-flag our service account and sharing has returned to normal with no changes required from my side.

Answer 2

I am posting for those who come across this article.

I had an issue that was unrelated to this particular situation, but experienced the same symptom. I could not access drive from Chrome no matter what I tried. Drive always responded with the unhelpful message 'that's all we can tell you'.

In the end it turned out that drive was configured to never use cookies. I don't recall setting that up (don't know why I would), but that change did it for me.