We have a number of automations with a competitor of Pipedream that I shall not name but rhymes with “Slappier” and noticed a new thing over the last 24 hours - a native Google Drive action (in this case, “Upload a File to Google Drive”) started to spit out a very unusual and discomforting message…something along the lines of:
Sorry…We’re sorry… but your computer or network may be sending automated queries
As a customer of an automation platform that is 100% automating things, you can see why this error message is troubling.
We’re of course porting the failing Slap over to Pipedream (because Pipedream is awesome) but I am concerned: since it was a native action over there, is there anything recent that Google may have done to cause any/all native actions across any/all automation platforms to suffer a similar fate?
I bring this up for two reasons:
The aforementioned note that we’re already in the process of porting it to Pipedream, and
I’d hate for our port to suffer the same fate because Google just decided to change how all API-based activity is leveraged by all the wonderful automation platforms out there…Pipedream included.
Where Pipedream is different is that we can expose a way for you to bring your own Google Drive app keys, so you can use your own personal custom Google app instead of the Pipedream provided one for ease of set up.
That would grant your own rate limits, more flexible scopes, etc.
... but your computer or network may be sending automated queries. To protect our users, we can't process your request right now.
It seems very strange and concerning that the error is an HTML page essentially accusing me of screen scraping, as opposed to some kind of API error. I don’t want to get locked out of my Google account because I’ve misunderstood what Pipedream is doing under the covers.