Be Careful With The Family You Choose

Part 1: How Inviting A Friend To Join My Google Family Ruined Everything

The Premise:

In late March 2023, while my new friend, whose name I should not mention for legal reasons -- let's call him Cody -- was living with me while he was trying to get back on his feet and find a home of his own, I thought it would be a nice demonstration of friendship and trust to add him to my Google Family. Adding him would give him shared access to certain folders and files on my Google Drive and allow him to control the IoT devices in my apartment linked to my Google account. So, I added him and sent him an invitation to alert him of it. 

The Confrontation:

Fast forward a few weeks, during which time there was no mention or acknowledgement of my invitation from Cody. I had completely forgotten about the whole thing until one afternoon in late April, following a series of very kind, appreciative text messages from Cody thanking me for being such a great friend, when he sent me a text message that contained just a screenshot of an email he had received showing him as a "Family Member (Limited Access)" on my Google Family account. I responded, recalling the invitation I'd sent, and asked if he was okay with my having added him. He responded in a fit of rage, asking me why I had added him and what made me think he would accept the invitation at all. 

Surprised and honestly bewildered by his unexpected anger over what I had considered to be a friendly, innocent gesture, I tried to assure him that I'd not done anything surreptitiously and was keeping nothing from him. I hadn't even fully grasped the extent of the accusation he had just hurled at me yet because I was so shocked to be suspected of violating Cody's trust. It just wasn't something that had ever occurred to me to do.

The Fight:

He continued screaming at me via text for a while, deaf to my protests and my explanations. It didn't help matters that he had been awake for several days, or that he had been hanging around with a low life who was notorious for hacking into people's networks and stealing identities. Cody was a ticking time bomb of paranoia, and he aimed the full force of that at me.

I was hurt by the accusation. To be doubted by someone in whom I had complete trust and in whom I thought I had instilled a mutual sense of understanding was a blow to the heart. I tried my hardest not to let my hurt feelings color the conversation, because I realized how vital this discussion was. 

I tried so hard to convince him to come and see me in person and not to force us to hash this out over text messaging. But when Cody is enraged, there's no reasoning with him. This was the first time I was seeing that side of him, and it was heartbreaking.

The Proof:

After some time had passed, I was able to retrace my steps in adding him and discovered a Google Help article that explained the process of adding a family member in greater detail. It turns out that when you add someone as a member of your family, Google does indeed send them an invitation to inform them they have been added, an invitation that must be accepted before its two-week expiration in order to make the addition of that family member final. 

But at the same time, when they are added, they show up in the Family group as a "Family Member (limited access)". This is the initial status that would have changed to simply "Family Member" had he or anyone else accepted the invitation before it expired. 

Cody simply hadn't seen the invitation when I sent it, and there's a very good chance he had deleted it or that it went to his junk mail folder. In any case, I thought I'd stumbled upon the perfect piece of evidence to show him once and for all that I had not violated his trust and was innocent of his accusation that I had hacked his network and gained access to his email account so that I could accept the invitation secretly on his behalf and delete it before he could see it. I took a screenshot of the help page and sent it to him.

He was not convinced. Despite what amounted to a completely unbiased and trustworthy piece of evidence directly from Google itself, he still held onto the suspicion that I had hacked him. And though he eventually dropped the matter and spoke of it no more, I would find out many months later that this encounter had distorted his perception of me and that every single thing I did from that point on was viewed by him through the fucked-up lens that he had crafted during this simple and innocent misunderstanding. 

It was, as I had predicted - the beginning of the end for our friendship. And despite the prophecy having sprung from my own message, I didn't see it coming until it was too late.